ART-PRESENTATION: Raquel van Haver-Spirits of the Soil
Raquel van Haver works on burlap, often combining oil paint, charcoal, resin, hair, paper, tar and ash in heavily textured compositions. She is interested in race and identity, drawing from African, Western, Caribbean and Latin American cultures within her community in the South-East of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her painting is raw and masculine, at times monumental and energetic, at others dark and ominous. Recent work continues to deal with social hierarchies and negotiations between ‘self’ and ‘other’.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive
Raquel Van Haver’s brutal visual language confronts contemporary society and the difficult relationships between authority and marginalised neighbourhoods. For her solo exhibition “Spirits of the Soil”, Raquel van Haver has created a new series of monumental paintings especially for the Stedelijk Museum, including the gigantic painting “We Don’t Sleep As We Parade All Through The Night”. Van Haver refers to her work as “loud” paintings in which she emphasizes the similarities between groups of people, with empathy for groups on the fringes of society. The new ensemble of paintings “Spirits of the Soil” originated in a journey that Van Haver made in 2017 to Lagos, Nigeria at the invitation of the African Artists Foundation. There, she immersed herself in the marginal communities of the metropolis with the aim of collecting stories and images that, later in her paintings, will merge with images from other communities she visited. Van Haver established friendships with the “area boys” in Lagos Island: loosely organized gangs of teenagers and street children. She photographed and sketched life in these social spaces, revealing how interaction revolves around meal times, when people come together to chill out, chat, swap news, and connect. Back in Amsterdam, the photos and drawings provide the basis for a new sequence of figurative compositions in which the artist interweaves experiences from Amsterdam (Zuidoost), Zimbabwe, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, London and other places. The paintings are characterized by a highly specific sense of form and a great material complexity. They are monumental, collage-like constructs painted layer over layer on burlap with gypsum, oil paint, spray paint, plastics, charcoal, tar, paper, ashes, and hair. Some parts of the image surface appear almost molded and transform into reliefs, while adjacent areas are marked by a sparseness very similar to drawing. The exhibition opens with an introductory gallery presenting photo collages Van Haver made in 2017 during the Lagos Festival, followed by a sequence of four gallery spaces, each featuring a large, new painting. The exhibition reaches its apotheosis in a huge space in which the central painting is embedded in a spatial installation: “We Don’t Sleep As We Parade All Through The Night” (2018). This painting measuring 4 by 9 meters, blends the imagery from all the previous galleries. The composition portrays a group of people seated at a table spread with food and drink. The central company around the table fans out into flanking scenes of people eating, drinking, and playing cards. The architecture of the painted neighborhood unfurls into a spatial installation with wooden partitions, steps and elevations.
Info: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 25/11/18-7/4/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl
