Yolande Heijnen: Someone, Someplace, Else

Opening Reception: 6pm-8pm Tuesday 5 October

Attendance at the opening reception is free, but registration is necessary. The event is open only to the fully vaccinated. Face-coverings are optional.

The paintings in Yolande Heijnen’s solo exhibition, Someone, Someplace, Else span the years 2016-2021; depicting friends, strangers, and herself, she is more specifically painting the threshold of what is revealed and what is concealed, in personhood and relationships.

“These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” (Rilke)

This cyclical movement between the impersonal and personal touches on why paintings of people may continue to have a magical allure for both those creating them and those looking at them. Embodying the psychological threshold of a doorway, window, and mirror, portraits create a method of looking out to look in and demonstrate a way of relating to others that involves time, a generosity of seeing, and the belief that when we are seeing someone else, we are also presented with an opportunity to encounter remote and unnamed aspects of ourselves.

With these possibilities for a phenomenological, and even interpersonal and social experience, as an engaged artist Heijnen asks, can the genre of portraiture be elevated today or responsive in a contemporary world? How can a portrait look, feel, be, and interact-- now? There is an inadvertent reply to this question from literature, a guiding force for the artist. In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, his own meditation on an interior’s connection with the exterior, and between the individual with the environment, he says, “When the image is new, the world is new.”

The paintings in Someone, Someplace, Else showcase Heijnen’s own quest for interpersonal connection and interrogation of selfhood through art, while living and working in studios, homes, and residencies in Greenwich Village, the East Village, Bushwick, Vermont, Ohio, North Carolina, and most recently in New Berlin, NY. Point of view and proximity change between paintings, as well as her relationship to observation and fantasy, with a growing emphasis on the poetics of paint and the language of the medium. In the background, of both her paintings and in life, exists a vital kind of space, one meant to harmonize the relationships between people, interior lives, and physical, material existence.

The exhibition Someone, Someplace, Else, is on display at Revelation Gallery at 224 Waverly Place, New York NY 10014 from October 5th - October 28th. The Gallery is normally open from 11am to 3pm Monday through Thursday. The show is curated by Chantal Soong Lee.

Yolande Heijnen was born and raised in Luxembourg, Europe. She is a Dutch national and since 1998 has lived in NYC, where she studied drawing and painting. On her work she says:

The idea of connectedness inspires my painting. I explore the human form, not only visually, but as an energy center and a mind-state of possibility, depicting accidental fragility and a sense of randomness, blurring or dissolving the concreteness of forms. Things are happening elsewhere or are experienced peripherally, and the subjects are not always fully present.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Revelation Gallery, 224 Waverly Place, New York, United States