Ellen Vrijsen’s Consolations, or colour phrases constitute an ongoing series that struggle with the spatial and chromatic mediations of lack as an existential condition. In a world divided between fortune and misfortune, modern man feels continuously voided of missed opportunities, capabilities and time.
Even though lack is constitutive of life, unfulfilled desires, partial voids, silence and powerlessness leave few indifferent. Modern man is a slowly emptying vessel who turns every lost drop of life into a word, a touch, a phrase. The series Consolations turn affects related to absence and deficiency into colour phrases. They are landscapes where flatness and colour recuperate the emotional choreography of exclusion, of missing out and failure. After all, each affect is also a movement that is read on a surface, as a spatial formation, as an encounter between fields of colour. For those who think that affects are better left unspoken, Consolations offer a modest proposal: the series invites the attentive viewer to slowly read lack as gradual pictorial arrangements, as contrasting or corresponding fields and traces. After all, as the Western story of art tells us time and again, affects are better understood when staged, shared, read and seen.
Text and concept by © Vlad Ionescu
