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As a girl coming from Oud Gastel, a little village in the province of Noord-Brabant, Carina de Rooij studied at the Academy of Visual Arts / Tilburg with the intention : “Never admire the abstract rubbish”. However, during an excursion to “La Grande Parade” ( the farewell exhibition of Edy de Wilde, as director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) in 1984 she saw a painting of a billiard-table from Georges Braque, which was not painted in a realistic way but in a bend angle. “Exactly this way of painting gives you the feeling of standing near the billiard-table. This was a real eye-opener; it is possible to paint the reality as if you are experiencing it yourself. By unleashing the realism to fragments you will achieve openness in the image. This prevents the image of being unequivocal”.
After graduating in 1987 Carina de Rooij especially focused in her work of art on figure studies of people bathing. She named this series “In Water” showing clearly recognizable nudes in bright colours. In the mid 90’s these figures became more and more fragmented to chests, a bended leg, a lump of meat and the bath became a shell, an abstract framework for all the nudeness. The paint began to drip more and was smeared or scraped off. She reduced the colours to vulnerable skin tones, ochre and earth tones or soft moss-green.
A commission for a painting for the town hall of the village of Halderberge in 2005 changed her work enormously; at least at first sight. The paintings became 3 to 4 times bigger in size. People were replaced by fragments of concrete landscapes, a rail bridge, line bus, glazing, details of devices, streetlights or the reflection of it in glass. Everything is painted hyper-realistic in miscellaneous grey tones; not a single colour is used. The shapes are painted in an efficient way, but scattered in the composition and the view-point – the feeling of perspective – is distorted in such a way leaving you surprised to an extent that it requires you to seek guidance. “What is this about? What do I see?”…..are questions that directly occur when seeing one of her paintings. It is especially this feeling of not knowing that she consciously seeks in her work of art. After a long intermission from painting she noticed a picture in a newspaper which her husband was reading. She thought it was a magnificent painting, unrecognizably crooked and turned upside down, but beautiful. However, the moment she approached and seeing the image in a normal proportion its beauty had disappeared. That moment of doubt, of seeing something for the first time without being able to interpret it, is what she seeks in her work.
In her two meters sized paintings everything seems to move and disperse, but yet there is a coherence to be found. This is achieved by the tight restriction of colours and a strict composition of academic diagonals or rhythmic repetition of ellipses. By working in this way she moves between extremes : balance and chaos, harmony and dynamic, realism and abstraction.
Rebecca Nelemans
