Marleen Pauwels: leaning into quiet

“My figures choose to be in a state of solitude,” she reassures me. “They’re getting away from the crowds and the noise.” These figures aren’t lonely; they are at peace in their own company. And yet there is still something quietly confronting about them. While the unadorned settings, with their muted colours and stripped-back details, are inconspicuous - no expletives, nothing overtly political or charged in sight - they have, at times, been met with shock or horror.

Silence can be enormously confronting, Pauwels explains. In fact, she tells me, some viewers have had such a strong reaction to her skeletal bodies and the void-like environment of her worlds that they have gone as far as to say it brings historical atrocities to mind. Ironically, Pauwels retorts, silence should not be feared: it is perhaps one of the biggest luxuries we can have in a world where there is so much noise. This hostility towards the nakedness of her characters and the barrenness of her stage may say less about the works and more about the viewers' relationships with themselves. We are afraid of being alone because this confronts us with a yawning vulnerability in all of us, Marlene offers, a fear of being laid bare, of what is left behind when everything else fades away. 

In this way, her figures represent a certain bravery and vigour; a strength in vulnerability. They are at ease in solitude and without all the additional markers of identity we can often use to mask our true selves. “Their nakedness is them going back to their essence. It is my way of showing their strength.” 

In the same breath, Pauwels points me towards the window in Mondays Are Fine (2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm). Without getting overly metaphorical, the windows, doors and archways, as in I Wonder What The World Is Doing Now (2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm), in her works are like portals to new realms of understanding. They are “invitations to look beyond what’s in front of you.” On closer inspection, the walls of these paintings are delicately layered with written quotes.

They do not come from literature or famous people but are snippets of text the artist has spotted on newspapers, posters, leaflets, or album covers. Pauwels doesn’t seek them out exactly; if anything, they seek her out. She might be reading the morning news, wandering through the food aisle at a supermarket, or tracing her fingers over magazine covers, when the words make themselves seen. She then takes the text cutouts and places them in a little box containing a collection of such texts spanning 30 years. Here it safely stays, enveloped in a cosy nest of whispering words until the time is right. “I just have this feeling,” she explains, “when the text is right for the painting, or maybe the painting is right for the text.” They seem arbitrary without context but, when subtly layered into and under the surface of her canvases, held tight within crystalline silica and baking paper, they hum with new meaning and life. 

This ability to see something beyond what’s in front of you is a skill that Pauwels has honed and invites us, as spectators, to do the same. It takes a trained eye to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, but you don’t have to be an artist to learn how. It’s a practice of presence, of leaning into quiet, of opening your eyes, your whole being even, to the possibility of discovery.