Julie Cafmeyer interviews Els Nouwen

"I'm drawn to the night"

“For fifteen years, I threw away everything I made,” says artist Els Nouwen. I am in her Antwerp studio. On the wall are images she has collected over the years from magazines, second-hand books, and the internet. She is fascinated by darkness, suffering, the absurd, and the grotesque: skulls, Magritte painting a naked woman into thin air, the severed head of Holofernes, a scarecrow shaped like a female head, and a Hindu god. “I’m drawn to the night,” she says. “I try to bridge contradictions: the gruesome and the sacred, the erotic and the repulsive.”

As I look at her images of inspiration, I can’t help but wonder which works have ended up in the bin over the past fifteen years.

“Why don’t I simply paint a landscape?” she asks. She tells me she is actually quite good at painting from life, as she was taught at the Antwerp Academy. “But beauty must be revealed – it must escape the cliché, the all-too-familiar manifestations. To expose a deeper truth, superficial appearances must be destroyed. There is also beauty in destruction. At the end of the struggle, energy is released. The knowledge and experience I have gained help me progress in my work.”

And yet it all sounds so drastic. I find it hard to grasp that you can spend fifteen years jettisoning your work. Why? “The work didn’t live up to what I had in mind. I believed it had to be done differently.” Gradually, she found a way of working she felt was acceptable to continue with – where the value of the artwork is not determined by the purely aesthetic. A work can stay if it feels right, if it fits into a logical evolution toward the next piece.

Montage, cut and paste, assemblage

A recurring strategy is to work on several paintings simultaneously. Along the way, things fall into place. It is a practice that must remain in constant motion. She has always felt “a gigantic, intrinsic motivation” to paint. The destruction of an image, even a hundred times over, and the relentless searching is fuelled by a deep inner need. She cites Gerard Reve: “I believe that the truth is only revealed in that which collapses, which disintegrates.”

Does she sometimes regret destroying her work? “Yes,” she admits. “Afterwards I sometimes think: it wasn’t that bad. I actually need an in-between room for work that might have a future, but that’s not something I can force. Certain works are unbearable, and then they have to go – it’s stronger than I am.”

Els Nouwen — © Josefien Tondeleir voor M Leuven

I imagine such an in-between room: a place where work is temporarily freed from doubt.

A quarantine space that is temporarily avoided as an act of self-defence.

A transit where a work may reveal itself as permanent.

Despite the constant threat of destruction, there now exists a treasure trove of works that did survive: fierce, colourful paintings where the power of destruction dissolves into painterly birth. Until the very end of the process, new layers of paint are added, all kinds of images appear: pigs’ snouts, a jester, OXO, a tongue, facial gymnastics, naked bodies, and a smiling pepper.

Time and again, the image is partially renewed. Annihilation not as destruction, but as a constructive dynamic – like a thesis searching for its antithesis, and finally arriving at a kind of synthesis. Permanently disrupting the image as a process.

I look at a painting of the innards of a sheep with a fungal infection. “You’re so lovely, but you make such gruesome work,” one of her students once told her. And that’s true. It can rot; it can gnaw at you. It can hurt, chafe, and repel. And yet something sensual is conjured when I look at a shellfish that might just as well be a vulva. That is the magic of painting: eroticism and nightmare evoked in tandem.

She looks at her work. “So, what do I want to do with it?” she asks herself aloud. “Give my imagination free rein, celebrate the dark gloss of life.” Destruction as an instrument of creation. For Els Nouwen, the true abyss is not to paint.