EN
“The flat surface — including how patterned fields and colour blocks, as well as their meanings, relate to each other on it — is an important point of departure for my work. For the upcoming project at DE RUIT in Rotterdam I effectively separated these elements from each other, placing them in the exhibition space as such.” A.C.
DE RUIT - Project space Rotterdam
17 mei - 14 juli 2024
Tronie* — experiment in the exhibition space
For DE RUIT, Anuli Croon worked with sheets of semi-transparent tracing paper, as used by architects, stuck together in pairs. Lodged between them are colourful shapes — also made of paper, also semi-transparent. Although they appear to have been smoothed out, the incoming light still reveals subtle creases: this is, and always will be, ‘paper’.
Floating colours
The semi-transparent sheets of paper, and consequently also the colours in between them, overlap, thus resembling theatrical side wings. But while these are meant to hide everything in the background, Croon’s paper side wings actually reveal what lies beyond them.
Holes have been cut into the shapes — smaller and larger ones. This causes a play of incoming light and resulting shadows that further enhances the three-dimensional side-wing effect. Between them is a void, which becomes even deeper, less tangible and touchable due to all the reflections on the mirror window.
The colours are floating around in this void: sometimes alongside each other, sometimes on top of each other, and occasionally overlapping. This results in blended colours that are subject to constant changes while you pass the work.
Individually, the colour blocks themselves, as well as the holes cut into the paper, are quite abstract — simply ‘colour’, simply ‘light-and-shadow’. They may, however, suddenly coincide to form a figurative image; not flat and level like in a painting, but in three dimensions. Or actually four, the last being your own movement. A similar ‘time factor' also manifests itself in the slow shifting motion of the sunlight, which simultaneously causes all kinds of colour patches and shadows on the grey interior floor — these also shift along.
Studio visit
In preparation for this presentation and the present text, I visit Anuli in her studio — located in a basement, a former boiler room — in the Rotterdam Provenierswijk neighbourhood. A small room to the side is filled with book cases, while another one is filled with bubble-wrapped paintings that have either just returned from the exhibition I recently saw, or are ready to travel. Hanging on the surrounding walls are the canvases she is currently working on, both smaller and larger ones, some measuring 180x150 cm. There is only a small amount of direct daylight, and it is quiet: the hectic outside world far away, immersed in tranquillity and concentration. We are sitting at a table, facing each other, having coffee and speculaas biscuits.
I was already familiar with Anuli Croon’s work and thought it would be perfect for DE RUIT: its visual language invariably monumental, both on a larger or smaller scale. With stylised, yet still recognisable motifs in strong, solid colours — occasionally vibrant, usually muted. They exude a peacefulness befitting of this studio space. Some depict one or two human figures in frontal view, sometimes from the waist up, at other times just a head; not ‘actual’ people, not portraits, more like ‘people in general’ — almost still lives. Other canvases feature a single, flowerless vase, or nearly abstract urban architectural structures, also in frontal view, just like the human figures.
Anuli Croon
Anuli Croon (Leeuwarden, 1964) studied painting at the Royal Academy of Art and Design in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Graduating in 1989, she subsequently moved to Rotterdam, where she has been living and working since 1990. As a child she wanted to become either a cartoonist or a fashion designer. After finishing secondary school she was torn between studying literature and enrolling in an art academy. “I was living in Eindhoven at the time.’s-Hertogenbosch had an excellent reputation for painting. René Daniels had studied there. And I did not want to go to an art academy in the Randstad area.”
After graduating, Croon left ‘s-Hertogenbosch — “that city felt increasingly oppressive to me” — and settled in Rotterdam — “wonderfully metropolitan, wonderfully raw”. In those days that Rotterdam rawness entailed crumbling residential estates, redundant port areas punctuated with empty warehouses and industrial buildings, loads of activities in South Rotterdam (‘Zuid’) and at Nighttown, and numerous impromptu dance parties. In other words, a city with frayed edges, where many things were yet unregulated. A magnet for artists, with cheap studios, loads of room to organise things yourself, and lots of freedom.
Over the past 35 years, it was here that Anuli Croon was able to develop a clearly recognisable visual language completely her own. At first glance much of that previous impetuousness seems to have been replaced by visual peace and serenity. On closer inspection, however, her paintings turn out to be extremely complex.
Visual language
Typical for Croon’s paintings is the interaction between the main form and the — often equally intriguing — residual forms. There is hardly any space left as foreground and background often merge into each other. The main motif frequently subsides into the background, overgrown by a wide variety of grids and structures. These were constructed using sturdy lines or small line segments, all kinds of subtle dotted patterns, or larger circular, almost hole-like, shapes. Rhythm takes priority over space.
There is no three-dimensionality, no line perspective, everything remains flat; depth is only created by the colours and colour blocks themselves.
The shapes have very precise contours and the colour inside these is uniform and solid; sometimes vibrant, at other times more muted and subdued. It is an elaborate palette in which not everything has been rigidly reduced to primary colours, black-and-white, or straight angles. Instead there is a visual vivacity, partly due to the undulating contours fanning out in all directions.
There are no wild gestures with large paint brushes; Croon exchanged these for paint rollers. However, those who look closely will still discover tiny brush strokes, applied with delicate paint brushes. Sometimes the paint is matte and opaque, while at other times it is somewhat glossy. This makes you aware of how thick the layers of paint are. The works also feature gradient colours, especially in the grid patterns that often have somewhat frayed edges and seem to have been painted off the cuff, loosely. Here it becomes clear that in all their rigid stylisation, these paintings are still handcrafted, artisanal. “That breathes life into them,” Anuli says, “too rigid is boring!”
Colours and shapes — those are what it is all about, those are what you should be looking at, those are the main event.
“I like ‘silent’ themes”
Anuli’s paintings zoom in on classical themes: people, still lives, landscapes. Nothing really happens in them. Her people are not engaged in conversation, there are no words, no deeds, no action, no ‘togetherness’, they are not even looking at each other, or at us. Her vases and jugs are not filled with flowers, which also means no blossoming and floral smells, or withering; there isn’t even a slow slug in sight. Her urban landscapes do not depict noisy squares or busy traffic flows, no parties or events, no spectacular cloudy skies, no daylight or darkness. They are, however, all about silence, the sounds of silence.
Anuli says she is not a fan of drama, but instead searches for the moments in between major events. Although invariably figurative, her images are highly stylised and therefore nearly abstract. They are also generalised: there are no portraits of ‘actual’ people, no specific objects, no recognisable cities. Stylisation thus equals de-individualisation: it is not about ‘that particular vase’, but rather about ‘a vase in general’. Her ‘people’ are often prototypical as well: a parade of awkward clowns, introverted characters, clumsy office clerks, pathetic sufferers of life. It is all hardly exuberant, hardly cheerful. A reflection on urban life perhaps? But again: pay attention to the shapes and colours — that is where things start getting exciting!
Tronie: experiments
“For DE RUIT I wanted to create something unlike anything I had ever done before,” Anuli Croon told me upon entering her space. And this meant doing experiments and simply allowing things to happen… While in her paintings she had always been in full control of all aspects, she now had to be brave enough to slacken the reins — an additional puzzle! On the canvas she can carefully mix her colours, but here she worked with paper in standard colours. Fortunately this paper is transparent; the side wings and the openings in them give rise to colours and perspectives that would be difficult to predict…
Paintings are hanging silently on the wall, the stretched canvas entirely smooth. Anuli occasionally works on glass, sometimes also using sleek sheets of plastic in various colours, transparent or opaque. The paper used for the presentation at DE RUIT can hardly be called smooth and is suspended away from the glass: it is thus able to move along with the airflow (heat, draught, et cetera).
This affects the mutual relationships of the colour blocks. While Anuli usually plans and demarcates elements such as these very precisely, to a certain extent these coloured shapes — positioned next to as well as on top of each other — are leading lives of their own, with the reflections on the mirrored window also participating.
What you see is all subject to constant change while you are passing by, or eventually pause to look. A moving image!
Guus Vreeburg / DE RUIT 20240515
*
‘Taken from Dutch seventeenth-century painting, the term tronie refers to a study of an exaggerated or generalised facial expression. Tronies are not intended as portraits or caricatures and do not depict an identifiable person.’
NL > EN by Art Of Translation / Marie Louise Schoondergang
