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10/3/2012

Marliz Frencken

Ornis A. Gallery, Utrecht

The sculptures by Marliz Frencken from the Netherlands appear to originate from a surreal world. They consist of female figurines which are fairytale-like, fragile and precious—and each and every one is unique. At first sight these radiant, eye-catching, colourful sculptures are reminiscent of glazed fruits at a fun fair that spark a childish design to grab them. Frencken adorns her clay figures with curious found items and wraps them up in transparent synthetic resin. Each of the sculptures, regardless of whether they are quietly immersed in thought or ecstatically twisting their bodies, tells its own story. Frencken creates in her sculpture a highly imaginative cosmos in which anything is possible. For example, she provides a slender beauty in a red and white checked dress with an arm reaching right down to the ground—or alternatively places, say, a disco ball, a porcelain bowl or an egg shell on the heads of her creations.

Frencken's love of beauty is, as she states herself, attributable to her background. Her impressive image of the beautiful woman stems from her relationship with her mother, who died young. The photograph of her mother wearing a ceremonial wedding dress keeps her daughter's memory alive. Just as children slip into their mother's clothes and transform themselves into a grande dame or a ballerina, the artist fashions diverse female forms which are beautiful, enchanting beings.

Frencken integrates chance as an artistic principle into her work by decorating the coloured clay sculptures with things she has simply found (objets trouvés) as well as materials taken from everyday life and consumer articles. Everyday trinkets, decorative knickknacks and functionless gadgets become anecdotal and symbolic elements within the context of her sculpture—utensils that point to their own correlation of meaning, such as the petite woman dressed in festive green carefully holding a bottle of eau de cologne in her arms as if bearing a child or some other precious item. The artist experiments boundlessly in this manner with shapes and symbols of high and low culture: she combines and recycles quotes from pop art, surrealism and rococo; she blends the idea of classical sculpture with the aesthetics of pop culture.

The protective shell of transparent synthetic resin holding the core of each figurine like a glass mantle lends the sculptures a luxurious sheen and 'eternal' durability. Yet at the same time it appears as if Frencken intended to 'freeze' the figures in their beauty, almost turning them to stone with a curse—and they are caught forever in the moment of their creation. Consequently, the resin coating reminds us not just of candied fruit but also something 'dripping': the extravagance of rococo, still life with fruit dripping with overripeness, ideas of decadence and vanitas. Frencken's excessive use and combination of materials brings about the ambivalent character of these bizarre, strange beauties, which at second glance cause more puzzlement and disconcertment, and challenge the eye of the beholder. The sculptures appear equally attractive and repulsive, enchanting and sinister, figurative and abstract, precious and kitschy.

Given her mass production—over the past two years she has produced 200 sculptures—Frencken's work has acquired an almost programmatic character.

It appears insistent, possibly even obsessive. After twenty years of painting, the artist is now taking a new artistic tack which boils down to defamiliarisation, the metamorphosis of the (female) figure. Frencken's artistic technique is excess, now a principle of her work. The protruding details are extreme, as are the quantity of detail, the variety of meaning, and the radical combination of everything. The ambivalence of her sculptures is rooted in the hypertrophy that guides Frencken's work on the narrow dividing line between art and kitsch along which the artist moves in a delicate balancing act.
Jan Hoet

Opening 11 march

Ornis A. Gallery
Maliesingel 9 Utrecht
Opening hours: wed-sat from 12.00-17.00hrs. And on appointment.
Admission free

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