Away from the daily rush
Marinka Reuten’s work explores themes of impermanence and transience, which can include beauty as well as detachment and timelessness. In addition to light and darkness. Hope and resignation.
After a successful career as a graphic designer, Marinka Reuten will change course in 2022 when she decides to focus entirely on her first love, autonomous art.
The enigma of what moves between the temporary and the eternal can be seen in her paintings where you wonder whether you are looking at something that will become or has already been. Exactly that indefinable and timeless, ‘frozen’ as it were on the canvas, takes you out of the everyday world and confront you with yourself. Titles like ‘How to be (at Ease) #3’, ‘Slow All This Down #2’, ‘Nowhere. NowHere #5’ illustrate the thoughtful nature of her artistic process in which everything takes on existential meaning.
Like her paintings, her black-and-white photographs of a forest, a tree leaf or a close-up of a flower demand deep watching. They only begin to speak to you when you open up to what they reveal. A photograph of a tree is nothing more than a photograph of a tree, and a painting of a circle is just a painting of a circle, until you discover or feel in that tree and in that circle something that the artist has put into it that resonates with a particular feeling or sensation.
Marinka sees much in little and needs little to express much.
The almost immaterial, atmospheric quality of her paintings coincide with a sense of fleetingness and transience that can make us reflective or melancholy, but not gloomy. There is too much softness and wonder, light and positive attention to the small and seemingly insignificant in her work for that.
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An interview with Marinka about her work you can find here (in Dutch)
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