17 Jan 2005, Posted by heingart in Art, Flash Art, 0 Comments

Review of Maaike Schoorel, Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam

Despite humans’ big brains and seemingly infinite storage space, when we think back to an old memory it’s usually not hi-res video we conjure up but rather a still image, fuzzy around the edges and hard to keep in place. The latest paintings by London-based Dutch artist Maaike Schoorel speak keenly to this disconnect. Her canvases depict normally salient details like faces and bodies as soft blurs, highlighting instead incidental wisps of remembrance like a bathing suit or an argyle sweater – as much as we may want to, we can’t control what we remember, and smallnesses such as these often jump to the fore of the mind’s eye.

The paintings on display at Amsterdam’s Galerie Diana Stigter are based on family photos made by Schoorel’s parents and their friends during her childhood. Though such images inform our personal histories (i.e. there I am on that boat, so it must register somewhere, even if I don’t necessarily recall the event), the recollections that actually stick in our heads are arbitrary at best – why is a colleague’s name lost in a haze while a kindergarten friend’s curious haircut is still as clear as yesterday?

Schoorel’s paintings are dominated by pale whites and yellows, invoking fading newspaper pages or ancient snapshots. At first they appear almost imperceptibly faint, but closer examination reveals telltale flourishes – a few vague lines turn out to be a beach towel or an empty picnic table, and a stray red bottle cap is enough to bring an entire image into focus. Her works are laced throughout with a sense of loss, of an unreconstitutable past peopled by figures long since gone.

Fancy new technologies like transcranial magnetic stimulation or the behavioral research of psychologists like Timothy Wilson are only just now beginning to shed some light on the workings of our hard drives, suggesting that we actually know very little indeed about why we think, remember, and do what we do.

(Originally published in Flash Art in January 2005)