THERE BEING | BEING THERE is an ongoing project for the painter Wieke Ververs. Its genesis is an idyllic period spent some years ago in a monumental country house whose stylized garden merged into its surrounding landscape in a manner that evoked its history and existence within the elusive fourth spatial dimension: Time.
The drive to depict such four-dimensional space is at the heart of Ververs’ work in this series. Her eponymous painting Being There is the touchstone with its brutally evocative inscriptions World Time, Personal Time, Natural Time and Space Time, all time-stamped with their original story. Installations on the theme were originally exhibited at the Monte Veritá project space in Ascona, Switzerland, and the Aleph Contemporary Art Pavilions in Almere. The recent paintings, from a palette of muted grays and greens, recast the memory of landscape and interiors in monochromatic imagery that manifests the monumental settings.
Time and the spaces intuited between time and its perception are explored in the paintings and the process of painting: destroying and creating. Applying and scraping paint on a flat surface in search of a balance between figuration and abstraction. Ultimately, the image is a spark, the intent to ignite and illuminate a memory that takes the figurative landscape or interior beyond the way they are typically experienced. It enters that other dimension. We experience the source and its image by Being There. The image recedes into memory and is There Being.