I am a traveler, in my life I have moved from place to place and from country to country. Again, and again I have packed and repacked my belongings, folded things down to fit compactly into boxes or a suitcase. In this process I have become aware of both the act of folding: A closing or concealing and unfolding.
My works are all based on attention for the process as an unfolding time, as a procedure for carrying out specific actions which make the vicissitudes of the paint visible. Thinking of paint as an index is the forgetting for a moment of the paint itself, now reduced to evidence of the manner of application. But pigment not only drips or splashes, it can also bleed, urinate, seep and stain, markings that are more difficult to extract for the index. It is indeed tempting to see these traces as the action of the paint itself, the painting, rather than being painted.
I paint paintings on which I perform a series of actions: From painting and repainting large fields or marks of saturated, nearly straight out of the tube color, to stretching and un- stretching, folding and unfolding. In between painting I enlist a process that includes written notes, film and photos captured with my mobile phone, which I consider as an extension of my tactile and visual senses. My work shifts throughout the process between 2-d on the wall, stretchers, floor or outside on the land, and 3-d; tightly folding the painting in process into a rectangle of cloth along with any materials-such as died grass, sand, mud and other natural material that may have fallen or been dropped onto the flat surface. Once the works leave the studio, this performance continues as I change the means of display each time they are put on view in a new space: Sometimes stacking many paintings into a column or draping or stretching them in new ways.
In their foldedness my works invite people to think about time and painting in another way aswell. A fold interrupts flatness, enclosing volume so that the painting’s surface is understood as pliable, indeed as something packable and unpackable as it exists in stretched and un-stretched formats. Central to my works is the fundamental question of existence, my personal timeline. A reflection of one’s own life and the passage of time. My intention is to let the viewer wonder what they’re looking at and what remains hidden. These boldly colored and refined containers I can take and display anywhere in the world, regardless of space and time, regardless of where I am coming from or where I am heading.
Basel, 2023
Mariejon de Jong-Buijs
All rights reserved: @Mariejon de Jong-Buijs, 2023