NELLEKE CLOOSTERMAN

Nelleke Cloosterman's paintings appear at first glance in the Vanitas fashion, still lifes of flowers, birds, fruit and candles, 17th-century imagery of expensive worldly possessions. But across the works are a series of small rebellions that manipulate the model of the Vanitas. Void-like settings, usually a non-descript room with the suggestion of a boundary, a wall, a curtain, an end, are opened up by Cloosterman. Walls become endless skies and dense forests, expanding the scope of the paintings across worlds. Here, multiple realities seem to exist, exchanged in thin layers of oil paint. This activates the objects in the paintings; birds are uncaged, flying wingless against an expanse of blue.

Cloosterman appears to deny the nature of the Vanitas, that the one certainty in life is death. Instead, the works exist in their own utopia, clear skies dotted with perfectly rounded stars and flowers that never wilt. There’s an artifice to this perfection that is unnerving, underpinned in some works by acts of destruction or violence, a knife stabbed through a discarded lily, a petal set aflame by a candle, an anonymous hand either reaching in to assist or lazily retreating from the scene. The white lily, a Western image of purity and innocence, leaves us questioning these acts. Is it a rejection of the ‘innocence’ enforced on women by patriarchy or a representation of the violence taken against women in the name of purity, for the desire of purity, to own it? If a Vanitas intends to implore us to live a life free of sin, Cloosterman's work pushes us to question what sin is.