About my work

Things are not always what they appear to be. At first glance, the figurative paintings of Keetje Mans lull the viewer into a sense of safety. Her elegant palette of subdued pastels, contrasted by deep emerald tones, and her careful arrangements of delicate houseware, patterned furnishings and lush plants have a soothing effect. Yet, upon closer inspection, the apparent order of things is threatened by chaos at any moment. Plants and animals become unruly set pieces in bourgeois living spaces: flowers squirm, a raven is plotting escape. Even the decorative objects seem to develop an eerie life of their own. Candlesticks whisper to each other, cocktail glasses are drifting tantalizingly close to edges. A telephone is possessed by tiny demons.

Mans’ visual worlds are placed in an intermediate world between observation and phantasy, of what is tangible and what is suppressed. Sometimes, the mysterious leans towards the morbid: severed heads are neatly lined up on shelves or used as exotic sofa cushions. At others, the view is invited into a utopian dreamscape, where magnificent shield-maidens ride through fields of man-sized flowers. Their horses are decked out in ornate caparisons, cloaks of patterned fabric matching their mistresses. It is this contradiction, the clash of the untamed and the civilized, that runs like a thread through Man’s motifs. Her fondness for the intimacy of enclosed spaces can be compared to artists like Leonora Carrington or Florine Stettenheimer, who sought for the surreal in the luxury life of modernity.

Man’s relationship to nature is often linked to her upbringing: as a child she undertook extensive travels with her parents, spending extended periods in Costa Rica and Curaçao. Although the local folk art and free way of living undoubtedly left important imprints during her formative years, her adult gaze is shaped by the Dutch landscapes of hills and forests and her experiences by the confinements and privileges of western middle-class life. She is fascinated by what she calls “exotic kitsch”, like a seashell placed on a bathtub rim.

From 1999 to 2004, Mans studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht. She loves the finely observed dioramas of high society by painters such as Manet or Toulouse Lautrec, as well as the curved lines and bright colors of Georgia O’Keeffe. Having completed her studies at renowned Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Mans is sharply aware of contemporary academic discourses surrounding feminism, post-colonialism, and consumerism. At the same time, she has always been drawn to the home-spun quality of outsider art, the secrecy and obsession with which Henry Darger assembled figures for his monumental battle scenes from cartoons and advertising brochures in his chamber. Following the birth of her child, Man’s briefly turned to textile art, in order to avoid toxic paint fumes. Stitch by stitch, in between breast feeding, she created a small number of intricate embroidery pieces, each mirroring the female experience: the boredom of the house, where crafting becomes the only form of creative self-expression.

Perhaps, Man’s paintings can better be described as mental states, than as interiors. Her artistic process is intuitive, direct, messy. Her compositions are created directly on the canvas, without preliminary sketches, in direct dialogue with the work. Mans’ mainly paints in oil, undiluted, directly from the tube. The contamination of her colors with black, lending them a certain heaviness, happened involuntarily at first, and is now characteristic of her style. In her own words, she doesn’t like it, when things are too bright. There is comfort in darkness.

Text by Diana Weiss

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