The images in Maaike Schoorel’s paintings are barely there. The seven white and off-white canvases in this exhibition offer an initial impression of blankness and luminosity; they demand protracted patience and slowed-down perception to discern the imagery that is hinted at in each piece. Reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s monochromatic “White Paintings,” Schoorel’s surfaces are particularly sensitive to changes in ambient light and shadows cast by the viewer’s passing body. What looks like a predominance of pallor matures into an array of subtly tinted off-whites slightly differentiating each painting from a distance: Katherine lying down (all works 2008) has a cold, bluish tinge while Still life with sunflower and wine glass radiates a creamy warmth and Naomi on a pillow gives off a pinkish glow. Descriptive titles help prepare the viewer to make out faint indications of a portrait, still-life, or garden-scape in the pale ground of each oil painting.
Schoorel’s works cannot be photographed satisfactorily; they need to be seen in person. The few marks on these canvases hover between coalescence into figuration and dissolution into a lightly colored collection of staccato strokes and nearly imperceptible discolorations. As though sketched with dirty fingers to lightly map the picture plane, Schoorel’s painting approximates the sullying of a clean canvas with indistinct smudges, oily patches, and soiled rubbings. In their sparseness and restraint, often wavering on the edge of visibility, the paintings evince vulnerability as well as a thoughtful hesitation and deliberate tentativeness. If there is an inherent violence in mark-making and a melancholic inadequacy at the heart of representing a person or place, Schoorel responds with an attenuated deferral that prolongs the considered preparatory period of looking and reduces the evidence of her material interventions.
