Monica De Cardenas

Marie Rosen (Project Room)
23 November - 22 February 2014

Opening: Saturday 23 November 2013 6.30 pm

In the Project Room we present the first exhibition in Italy by the young Belgian artist Marie Rosen, born in Bruxelles in 1984.

Marie Rosen’s paintings are characterized by a dreamy atmosphere and a mild form of alienation. She often depicts young people who are caught in somewhat wooden poses. These are mysterious scenes, presented in very finely painted little works that recall the small-scale paintings of Francis Alÿs. The delicate nature of Rosen’s paintings is reinforced by the deliberately small format. They are moreover, painted on wooden panels whose corners are rounded off and sometimes also trimmed a bit. The wood recalls Byzantine icons. Apart from the Byzantine influence, there are also echoes of Gothic painting –as in the way in which the figures are separate from the background and are depicted in a flat way, without much perspective. When Rosen depicts her figures in a natural landscape, the latter is presented in a stylized way without much in the way of detail. In a few cases, however, there is a more elaborate background of geometric or floral motifs. At the same time, Rosen counters the delicacy of her paintings by sometimes scraping the wooden panels, which gives her pleasant little paintings a rawer edge. Which is something they could use, as occasionally these works seem a bit sappy, too reminiscent of illustrations in children’s books or trite popular painting. In most cases, however, Rosen succeeds in absorbing her diverse (art-historical) references into a distinctive style of her own. The androgynous protagonists linger to meditate, one might say, on their bodies and the relationship of these to space. There, in a secret game, they tighten a ring or handle a ball, so kindling the fantasies of each and all.