OUTOPOS – Emmanuel Van Der Meulen

It was in the early 1990s when Emmanuel Van der Meulen began practicing painting. She was self-taught before joining the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Higher National School of Fine Arts,) Paris in 1995.

Since 2004, the artist has been developing paintings which have at their centre a large, flat, solid surface of generally monochromatic neutral tones. Around this central area, we find divided surfaces, margins and borders that, in themselves, are also flattened through their supported colour. Rejected, either on the sides or on the top, these margins are there to signify empty or vacant spaces, even if they consist of painted spaces. The artist deliberately uses simple forms that are barely recognisable so that the spectator can quickly come to terms with why it’s named “the experience of painting itself.”

Image: Emmanuel Van der Meulen, No title #64, 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 110 cm