The works of Martha Nieuwenhuijs can be said, to use an outdated term,
"figurative", in the sense that they include figures, or better, recognizable shapes which,
cut out from white cloth and then burnt and treated with ferrous oxides (rust) in order to
colour them partially, are repeated and slightly changed in a boundless pattern of tale,
always the same and always new in an endless possibility of variation.
A delicate but penetrating fascination emanates from a representation that may be strong,
but is never screaming, never roaring.
The figures have no eyes but they look at you in
silence, no mouths but they talk to you.
They crowd motionless and silently, greyish and
disconcerting, outlined in the background of a tapestry whose backdrop, with
its thickening and thinning of undulating weft, suggests the crystallized vibration
of the absence of sound.
What fascinates me is that Martha Nieuwenhuijs can be
figurative without being descriptive.
The figures have no eyes, ears, noses, mouths;
but even if they lack these conventional identification marks, one clearly discerns their physiognomy
, even if it is not pencilled in.
The figures' gestures hint at movement;
without flat realism,
they point at action.
To be able to tell a story without falling in the tricks and traps of visual realism is, I think, a remarkable achievement.
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