[en/nl]
The place where technology and imagination come together, reinforce each other and inspire each other is the world of science fiction. From that interest, as a scifi lover, Marissa Evers' work appealed to me when I first saw it. It was around 2010, a period when I was also temporarily interested in architecture, an art form virtually unknown to me until then. Of course, as a born and bred Rotterdammer, I saw the city being built up supermodernistically, but around the age of 35 I immersed myself in architecture for the first time. Briefly, it has to be said, but three names have stayed with me strongly; Niemeyer, Calatrava and Libeskind, because in their work, too, I was struck by the neo-futurist style, which I knew from the science-fiction films I saw in the many cinemas that still existed in Rotterdam in the 1980s.
Anyway, back to Marissa. So it was around 2010 that I was introduced to one of her characteristic three-dimensional drawings. First via the internet but shortly afterwards I had the pleasure of seeing an Evers in real life. Science fiction, the city, it all came together for me and my interest chalked up.
s2s
A meeting with Marissa herself did not take place until many years later, in 2024, when she visited an exhibition here at Atelier 21. A visit to her atelier in Haarlem followed shortly afterwards, culminating in a joyous agreement to exhibit her work in Zierikzee.
The 11.11-metre-wide wall relief DB-AA-23 level 5, A New Hope which Marissa commissioned from the Filmkoepel in Haarlem, confirmed my scifi perception of her work. After the conversations in her studio, several views were added to my perception of her work after that entry.
With the drawings, which will be both two- and three-dimensional during this exhibition, Marissa creates unpredictability with very precisely elaborated material. The drawings depict a metropolitan environment, the metropolis, from photographs she collected or took herself during her travels, captured in contour lines. These single-line urban representations, are drawn layer upon layer in varying degrees of pencil hardness on paper or 3D panels. It is not known in advance where the lines of the urban landscapes reinforce each other, “touching” each other so much in the overlap that multiple perspectives emerge.
Allowing chance, randomness or entropy in art creates new structures. Whereas architectural drawings, for example, usually represent control and planfulness, the concept of chance thus opens up new poetic possibilities.
Even in the apparent order and precision lies the unexpected: a hand that briefly shakes, a line just slightly out of kilter, a window slightly out of its rebate. With that, coincidence is not accidental, but deliberately applied.
detail s2s
PM13-FortCass
ruimte
Sometimes art seems to catch or bring time to a standstill, then it strips away time and time itself almost becomes visible. It can happen to you with a painting, a poem, music or otherwise. The perception of time becomes palpable, slowly stretched and caught for a moment, like in a film still, until it flows away again. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described such a moment, where present and past come together in the now, as ‘Jetztzeit’. A term by which Benjamin also assumes that time is not a straight line of cause and effect, but non-linear. Jetztzeit is a temporal disruption of continuous, empty time. In that moment, the moment where meaning arises in empty time, he speaks of a charged now.
Similarly, Marissa Evers' art works on me. Her drawings in different hardnesses of graphite, they are not just layers on top of each other: the overlaps also function as an accumulation of time, where each object, each line, each trace represented memories.
With the open and layered drawings on three-dimensional panels, Marissa creates space upon space, and with that you could say: she draws in space.
Marissa Evers' work is on display at Atelier 21 throughout June
5 - 28 junE 2025
Thursday, Friday and Saturday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
or by appointment.
On Thursday 5 and Saturday 28 June, Marissa herself will be present at Kraanplein 22 in Zierikzee. You are hereby invited to meet her in person on those days.
©marissa.evers
frans.blanker - text, video, sound
©marissa.evers
Marissa Evers (1974, Auckland, New Zealand) studied at the Royal Academy of Art & Design ('s-Hertogenbosch, 1991-1997), the College of Art Edinburgh (1997-1998) and at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (1999-2001).
She has exhibited at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 37PK (Haarlem), Re: Rotterdam Art Fair, Galerie Franzis Engels (Amsterdam, Cologne), Cabin (Antwerp), Art3f and the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (Brussels), among others.
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