It Just Makes Sense

Pien Rademakers puts four  young, talented, female artists in the spotlights. The exhibition It just makes sense offers Jessi Strixner a stage together with Leonie Schneider, Bonnie Severien and Florentijn de Boer.

Leonie balances between fiction and reality, Bonnie between architecture and nature. And Jessi plays with what we think we see and what is real. She puts us in the wrong direction by taking everyday garments like tennis socks and bra’s out of their context and elevates them from wearable products to iconic works of art on the wall or on a pedestal.

For her solo in the upper space of the gallery, she shows new works skilfully carved from a single piece of lime wood. In this way, Jessi knows how to give the hard material the softness of supple textile. For the new disco jacket she combines her passion for vintage clothing from the eighties that she collects, with her fascination for the way in which we can both shape our personality with clothing and that we are judged by our style. In doing so, the artist emphasizes the great impact that clothing has on our daily lives.

Painted novels

Leonie Schneider also plays with our perception; she skillfully balances between 'real' and 'false'. Like a novelist with paint instead of a pen, she brings her characters to life. Even though they are based on her own experiences and the roles that different characters play within a family, the characters are clearly fictional. They seem to have moved from a comic strip to her large narrative paintings that reveal themselves as scenes in a play or chapters from a book.

For her new, colorful and detailed series of paintings, she again uses an exuberant visual language that originate from her imagination, but this time her narrative has shifted to two brothers Erik and Allan and their younger sister Agg. 

In two extra large works she highlights the theme of 'learning'. In one painting, Agg learns everything about creative processes from her writing brother Allan, in the other, the mechanic Erik teaches her to make something with tools. The characters in Leonies scenes are painted chapters in a thick book without words.

Natural interiors

Bonnie Severien shows her latest works in various formats and shifts from previous works in which she combines tightly staged and assembled architecture and a dynamic nature, to the interior. Also here she brings nature into the interiors: it is cultivated by the human hand and offers a view on the nature outside. Bonnie also does this by painting natural materials and textures in detail, such as a wall made of wood veneer and a table made of marble.

Her canvases unmistakably breathe a modernist fifties and sixties atmosphere because of her special use of color in bottle green, brown tones and pastels. The interiors are also inspired by the sixties, such as the bucket seats by Geoffrey Harcourt for Artifort. Bonnie manages to evoke a mysterious, serene atmosphere; due to the physical absence of people, the interiors become quiet places that offer space to muse.