Drawings and watercolours of Martha Nieuwenhuijs which are distinguished for a
compositional harmony, an economical use of expressive media, and a sober style,
are at the same time a working out of a project and a search of essentials into fragments.
If I tear up a piece of a drawing, a portrait or a landscape for example, what is left?
The drawing can be irreparably lost but it is possible that the fragment still conserve essentials
of the whole work, in addition to a certain fascination.
Martha is always in search of this "plus", subtracting, in a unstable balance between complete destruction and perfecting an imperfect instant. That recall to mind the words of Thomas Bernhard "The greatest pleasure is given by fragments and it is not a chance that, as long as we live, we are delighted above all when our very live seems like a fragment and we find the whole ghastly and, after all, dreadful the perfection of anything that is completed."
Her works become tinged with few colours:
chalk, the hue of pouncing paper, ashen-grey, sepia, Indian ink, ochre, metallic oxides.
You don't perceive the absence of primary colours, as in some white and black drawings or
in Woody Allen's film Manhattan, it looks like their poetry improve just for the absence of colours.
The artist "reveals great sensitivity for subtle, even minimal variations" wrote Piero Simondo
in his critical essay for her exhibition in 1998.
With this chromatic sobriety, fully based on hues
she re-create the colours of the past: the rusted, the stained, the burned. Sophisticated colours,
not easy to obtain.
Martha re-create on purpose the effects of "lost time" in such a way that the
final result looks accidental: a tear which just in this place harmonize with this shade of ink…
In her works it is possible to distinguish three plans: the subject ( a face, one or more figures,
often fragments of others drawings), the environment, usually suggested, and the background,
now often covered with graffiti.
Three plans, three lines, three ways of pictorial acting,
different for materials and for manner of drawing, which with their signs and atmosphere reveal
an enviable ability to frame, to make levels and depths , to suggest presences and absences by
means of shadows and profiles, to recognize the equilibrium and the asymmetry, the conscious
instant which makes a work successful.
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