MALAGA.- The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo of Málaga is presenting Soul Stories, a show curated by Fernando Francés. Danielle van Zadelhoff’s first solo exhibition in Spain features sixty-one photographs on existentialist and religious themes that illustrate the keen sensibility which has become her trademark. Influenced by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Murillo and other Renaissance masters, Van Zadelhoff makes extensive use of chiaroscuro or contrasts of light and shadow. The up-and-coming Dutch artist painstakingly reveals every detail of the light that falls on her sitters’ bodies and gazes; her subjects stare out at us, boring deep within and seemingly baring their own souls, but what we see is actually the soul of the photographer, reflected as if in a mirror.
“The shadow side of a person is the most interesting part and the least developed side. The shadow is the subconscious and unconscious part of a human being. This is the part that I want to discover in the other and in myself”, Danielle van Zadelhoff declares. A picture is worth a thousand words, and at times Danielle shows us her vision by portraying her subjects with their eyes closed, thereby making “you feel even more than a thousand words. You feel the essence in between.”
In the words of Fernando Francés, director of the CAC Málaga, “glimpses of Danielle van Zadelhoff can be seen in every theme, every gaze, every skin and the meaning of each work. She does not portray people cleverly chosen to serve as models; rather, she gazes into a kind of magic mirror and bares her own soul in every photograph. [...] Her approach betrays a profound knowledge of and interest in the art of the distant past, but it also gives the artist a certain detachment from the themes she wishes to depict. We might think it is a trick, a spell or a decoy designed to distract spectators and prevent them from noticing the artist’s reflexive quality. She has invented a kind of self-portrait using a model other than herself, in which she reflects her complex, sensitive inner world, her woman’s eye and her capacity for interpretation, which in turn manifests in different ways and meditates on different preoccupations.”
Born into an artistic family—her father was a painter and sculptor—Danielle was raised in a highly creative environment in her hometown of Amsterdam. Before switching to photography, she restored medieval buildings. Her family had a large library filled with books on art and history where Danielle became acquainted with the work of Baroque and Renaissance artists at an early age and discovered the chiaroscuro that would define her photographic style.
Chiaroscuro is a visual arts technique that uses contrasts of light and shadow to define volume and denote the importance of certain forms in a composition. It reached its zenith during the Baroque period in the 16th and 17th centuries thanks to artists like Caravaggio. In Baroque art, light has symbolic and psychological as well as formal value. Scenes are illuminated by a poetic glow emanating from whimsical sources that create sharp contrasts between light and shadow. We see this in the work of Rembrandt, a Dutch artist who strove to create psychological portraits and capture the sitter’s frame of mind. He even humanised the characters in his biblical scenes, just like Danielle.
In the 15th century, artists in the Southern Netherlands began producing pictures with realistic details and lustrous surfaces that captivated art lovers across Europe, thanks to the novel technique of oil painting. The great master of 17th-century Flemish painting was Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who became the most famous painter in all Europe and the favourite of his great Spanish patron, King Philip IV. Rubens’s sensual, majestic pictorial oeuvre was inspired by the art of classical antiquity. Chiaroscuro was also employed by other great 17th-century Flemish masters whose work has been a source of inspiration for Danielle, such as Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), and by German Renaissance painters like Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553).
Van Zadelhoff’s work is rooted in the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Willem Frederik Hermans, all of whom the artist has studied and read. She firmly believes that every person is unique, and that we are each accountable for our own actions and the meaning we give to our lives.
Danielle van Zadelhoff’s portraits, steeped in inspiration and mysticism, are reminiscent of 17th-century Flemish oil paintings. They exhibit a keen understanding of the dilemma of humanity, caught on camera and presented by the photographer. Danielle wants to show human emotions. For her, art is as natural and normal as breathing. But even breathing is not really as straightforward as it seems: if we stop to think about everything it entails—the air itself and the muscles and organs involved in the process—we realise that it is far from simple. In the same way, her photographs are both simple and complex. Her models wear little or no make-up, and she does not use Photoshop to touch up the pictures.
Danielle portrays their personalities, their mannerisms, their preoccupations and their obsessions. This undertaking has a truly exceptional autobiographical quality, and the model is just as important as the idea of a self-portrait expressed through a model other than the author. She arranges the costumes and hairstyles in a deliberate attempt to distance sitters from their own era. Danielle works very instinctively: she settles on a person who feels right to her and then tries to capture his/her spirit.
Most of the photographs in Soul Stories address one of two themes: religion and emotion. However, Danielle’s religious scenes do not just depict biblical characters; she also portrays what they are feeling. She admits that religion is a strong influence in her work, thought this is hardly surprising considering that she attended a Protestant school and spent a great deal of time with her Catholic grandmother.
In Paradise 1 and Paradise 2 (2016), for instance, Danielle explores the loss of innocence. But while this idea had a very real and dangerous allure in bygone days, our modern-day society is much more complex: today we place small identifying marks on our skin, such as tattoos and piercings, that bring us into contact physical contact with others and make temptation and seduction commonplace. Danielle treats seduction as part of the intricacy of human relationships. In these two pendant pieces (which depict the same theme but differ in size), Eve seems to be turning away from Adam while he covers his private parts, but not before having offered Eve a piece of fruit. In this case Adam is Eve’s “tempter” rather than her victim.
In the other pendant works entitled Believe 1 and Believe 2 (2014), the artist makes a critical statement about the church: the same character, draped in clerical vestments, gazes out at us in one photo and turns his back on us in the other. The image implies that this is how today’s society perceives the attitude of the Catholic Church. Garbed in outdated vestments, the church turns its back on real contemporary issues such as child abuse, the abuse of power or love between two people of the same gender.
In Lea and Rachel (2016), we see two half-naked women who seem to be sitting in a relaxed position. One of them faces us with her eyes closed, while the other turns away, giving the impression of shame. According to the Book of Genesis (29-31), while travelling Jacob stopped at a well where he met his younger cousin Rachel and decided to marry her. He therefore made a deal with his uncle Laban: seven years of service in exchange for his daughter’s hand. But at the last minute, Laban deceived his nephew and gave him the older cousin instead—his first-born daughter, Leah. After the wedding, Laban—now Jacob’s father-in-law as well as his uncle—offered him a chance to wed young Rachel (immortalised in sculpture by Michelangelo) in exchange for another seven years of labour, and the young man agreed. Jacob accepted his uncle’s trickery and decided to work another seven years in order to make Rachel his bride. Leah remained Jacob’s first wife and bore him six sons—founders of six of the twelve tribes of Israel—and his only daughter, Dinah. This female character is the subject of another of Danielle’s photographs: Duna (2016).
Nudity is also present in Madgalena (2017), justified by the subject’s close relationship with Jesus. Before becoming a disciple “equal to the apostles”, Mary Magdalene was a great sinner and may have worked as a prostitute, although the Catholic Church does not make this assertion. The woman in the photo closes her eyes, letting a sensual lock of dark hair tumble over her bare chest.
The exhibition includes two portraits of the Virgin Mary, which is logical considering that the artist’s favourite work is a Madonna and Child painted by Jean Fouquet in 1450. His Virgin Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim is the right panel of the Melun Diptych, now held in Antwerp (where the photographer currently lives). Danielle’s Madonna (2014) and Madonna with Child (2015) depict two totally different women. In one we observe Mary wearing a transparent white headdress with a pearl marking the centre of her forehead, and in the other we see her more human side. The second work shows her as the serene mother of Christ, a strong woman who understands and accepts the heavy responsibility of raising and teaching the future Saviour.
Another work related to religion is the curious From the Vesper serie with Neri Oxman and Stratasys, 2016, where we see a girl holding a Lazarus mask in her hands. The mask is named after a man who appears in the New Testament: Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha. The siblings lived in Bethany, a town near Jerusalem. Jesus stayed with them on at least three occasions, and according to the Gospel of John he raised Lazarus from the dead. This explains why the name Lazarus is frequently used as a synonym for resurrection and its association with this mask. Lazarus is a mask designed to contain the wearer’s last breath. Traditionally made of a single material, such as wax or plaster, the death mask originated as a means of capturing a person’s face, keeping the memory of the deceased alive. The mask’s surface is modelled after the person’s death, and its material composition is formed by the physical flow of air and its distribution across the surface.
Danielle shifted from biblical characters to a less overtly religious motif in Vanitas (2015). The Latin term vanitas can be translated as vanity, but in the sense of futility or insignificance rather than pride or arrogance. In art it refers to a particular type of highly symbolic still life that was very popular with Baroque artists, particularly in the Netherlands. The vanitas reminds viewers that worldly pleasures are vain in light of the certainty of death, encouraging them to take a sober view of the world. Danielle’s work shows a stricken man sitting with a skull, a key symbol in Baroque art, who seems to be meditating on the motto tempus fugit (time flies or time is fleeting).
Danielle van Zadelhoff has also created various portraits of feelings. The gestures or poses of her models communicate the emotions she wishes to portray. The human face can express a wide range of emotions and feelings through tiny muscle movements, most of which are involuntary and reflect fleeting sentiments. Even feelings of extreme joy, rage or pain are expressed spontaneously, and it is very difficult to fake them convincingly. The academic painters of the 19th century were trained to observe the effects of light on plaster-cast faces, and as a result their paintings of live models often reflected preconceived notions of light. In many cases this pictorial conventionalism went unnoticed, but when artists attempted to paint an outdoor portrait there were often discrepancies between the canonical illumination of the face and the apparently natural effect of sunlight on the landscape. In daily life, the perception of the human face is frequently determined by numerous simultaneous light sources; in the same way, a portrait artist may face a subject illuminated from multiple angles. This creates a plethora of shadows and may make it difficult to accurately represent the volumes of certain facial features.
For Danielle, the egg is the origin of life. In Fragility (2016), the first photo of a series, the model is trying to protect the egg, while in the second image she moves away from it and in the third we see that the egg is broken. This is Danielle’s way of showing that nothing can be protected in this world. We cannot stop things from happening, any more than we can prevent the loss of loved ones. We all need to learn the painful art of letting go.
In Desire (2016), the model turns her face aside but sensually displays her breast: she is the personification of desire. In Distrust (2017) the same woman exhibits a lack of confidence; with one breast bared and head bowed, she seems to be getting dressed because she is discomfited and intimated by the spectator’s gaze. In Secret (2016), a red-headed girl levels a defiant, fearless stare at the viewer; the confidence of her gaze makes us wonder if she is keeping a secret, or if her accusatory glare means that the secret lies with us. In Furious (2016), the light only illuminates part of a man’s face, just enough to show that it is taut with rage. His head is wrapped in a turban-like cloth, an element the artist also uses in Flower (2014), Mystery (2014), Red Turban (2015), Precious Silence (2015) and Blue Turban (2015). These works are closely related to Jan van Eyck’s 1433 Portrait of a Man wearing a red turban. The ambitions and accomplishments of this Netherlandish painter might well be summed up in the inscription on the frame of this work, written in a combination of Greek and Latin letters: Als ich can, “As I can” (but not as I wish).
Another example of works that represent feelings, in this case by means of an object that must be revealed, is Buttons (2014), in which a woman tries to button up her dress. There is no one nearby to help her, making this figure a portrait of loneliness.
The back can be an eloquent portrayal of the model’s personality, as illustrated by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans in several works he exhibited at the CAC Málaga, such as Unicorn (2010), Automat (I) (2008) and The Loan (2011). Danielle also uses women’s backs to capture their personality in Intimacy (2016), Female (2016), Alone in Confidence (2016), Yearning (2015) and Young Virgins (2015).
The artist’s use of the portrait and scene as a pretext for self-exploration, for filtering her opinions and doubts, her desires and ambitions, means that she is effectively portraying herself in each of those scenes. This recalls but is not the same as transformism, for it bears no resemblance to Cindy Sherman’s tactic of becoming her own alter ego in the Duchampian manner of Rrose Sélavy. Van Zadelhoff is more like Louise Bourgeois, who infuses each sculpture with her own preoccupations, concerns, ideas, feelings and desires. This explains why the central theme of Soul Stories is woman: women of the past and the preoccupations of contemporary women, including the artist. In Bird (2016), she tells us that women must be more aggressive to survive in contemporary society. The role of women in today’s society is undoubtedly one of the artist’s primary concerns. She insists that women take a prouder stance, a more provocative attitude and engagement. In this work, the woman adopts that defiant attitude as a means of overcoming the limitations and obstacles imposed upon her by today’s structures and society. It is the rebellion of womankind.
Danielle van Zadelhoff was born in 1963 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her work has been featured in solo shows at various venues, including the Persmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014), Fotogalerie Utrecht, Netherlands (From Deep Within, 2014), NUNC Contemporary Antwerpen, Belgium (From Deep Within, 2015), and the Memling Museum at Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, Belgium (2016). She has also participated in group exhibitions and projects such as Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World at the Design Museum, London, and Women and Photography at the CRAF in Udine, Italy, opening in September 2017.
