About halfway through our interview, Monique van Genderen mentions she’s been calling herself “clairvoyant” lately. It’s a perplexing ission at first, bringing to mind mediumistic artists and their fascinations with occult subject matter.
Van Genderen is quick to clarify that she’s speaking more to the concepts of repeated imagery and patterns, and how it might dangle within the viewer’s periphery.
“The abstractions that I’m working with are reminiscent of a bunch of information that you might be holding in your brain,” says van Genderen. “But now I’m pushing it forward and basically playing with it.”
She references “Afterimages,” a 2021 exhibition of her work at Vielmetter Los Angeles, the fifth solo show of her work at the Downtown space. In those pieces, especially the two identical, 35-foot horizontal paintings (cleverly titled “A side” and “B side”), it becomes more clear of the types of patterns she’s referencing. Think about when someone stares into something bright only to see flecks of light when they close their eyes.
But then imagine those flecks bombarded and cascaded with multicolored oils and pigments. Some are grainy and opaque, while others are transparent and translucent, the streams and specs resulting in some sort of mitochondrial explosion of color.
“They’re identical and hanging across from one another so there’s this repetition of shape. You see the shape there, you see the same shape there,” says van Genderen, explaining that she took an instinctive approach to the shapes and figures that resulted as she constructed the piece. “This shape might look too fishy-looking or another one might look like a weird glove, but I’m not going to fix it. So as I repeated the weird shapes over and over, it became interesting to think that the shapes came from somewhere. Am I trying to pull all of these things out of the subconscious, memory and weird future thinking"> (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd&cid=1ffe15d6-eb53-11e9-b4d2-06948452ae1a'; cnx.cmd.push( function() { cnx( { playerId: "8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd" } ).render( "11982501ceb44352bd1e95848c612274" ); } );
It’s an approach she plans to harness in the work she’s producing for her eponymous solo exhibition at Quint Gallery in La Jolla. Just a few days before our interview, she also installed a new large-scale piece from 2013 at ONE, Quint’s room-sized space inside Bread & Salt in Logan Heights. She isn’t planning on using repeating imagery like she’s done in the past, but her layered, effervescent hues and grainy, nemorous textures will be on full display.
“One of my main agendas in the work is to experiment with materials in paint, so I’ve shifted through a bunch of materials after the vinyl paintings,” says van Genderen, referring to one of her primary methods of using hand-cut and fragmented vinyl paint pieces to create a shiny, dappled effect. “It has to do with seeing images through glass and halos and things, but it needed to be done on raw canvas. So it put me onto this whole new method of material experimentation — painting on linen and raw canvas, and watching the kind of absorption that happens.”
Just a few steps from the La Jolla space, van Genderen also has a mural (“Paintings Are People Too”), which she debuted in 2020 as part of the neighborhood’s ongoing Murals of La Jolla public art project.
For the type of practice van Genderen incorporates in her work, both in the style and in the materials, it’s amazing to discover she has a solid resume of public art. One of the most recent and more surprising pieces was a giant abstract mural inside a new federal courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa., with its undertows and fluctuations of color meant to reference a nearby river.
“It’s pretty exciting to work in that way,” says van Genderen. “A lot of my public work has to do with the idea of empathy, especially as an abstractionist, because you’re always trying to communicate some kinds of alternative thinking. You really are trying to speak to the person who’s looking at the painting, but in an abstract way.”
Van Genderen was born in Vancouver, B.C., and raised primarily in what she calls a “one-bedroom surf pad” in Huntington Beach. Her mother was an avid painter, but never had any formal training, while her father worked at Kodak. Her mother was generally ive of Monique wanting to be a professional artist, but she was still essentially starting from scratch. She eventually attended UC San Diego, but says that she wasn’t interested “at all” in the representational styles of art that was often pushed on her, preferring abstraction and experimentation. She its this may have been a result of her inexperience with art before attending college, saying her public school in L.A. offered no art classes.
“I always attributed my color palette to growing up in Southern California,” says van Genderen, who has been a visual arts professor at UCSD since 2017. “Growing up as a young painter in San Diego, I think I developed it here and then carried it on to L.A.”
She later moved to New York City to attend School of Visual Arts (“it was horrible,” she says), but quickly “hightailed” it back to San Diego. While getting her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she says she began using what many would consider to be nontraditional materials. This included making paintings solely with vinyl materials, essentially, as she puts it, “making paintings without the brush.” This method often saw her painting palette-to-canvas but using things like X-Acto knives to layer translucent materials. She refers to it not as painting per se, but more like a “painting activity.”
And while she says she still considers herself primarily an “L.A. artist,” she also agrees that it’s sometimes unfair to lump certain artists into precise geographic scenes. One could argue that her work is something of a logical extension of the highly influential California Light and Space art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. For those artists, such as Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Helen Pashgian, the abstractionist elements of their work were often secondary to the execution and placement. What’s more, the ways in which that art is viewed, just as is the case with van Genderen’s work, the viewing experience can be highly dependent on outside factors (time of day, how much time the viewer spends with it, etc.).
“I have always been interested in Light and Space stuff — pattern, decoration, painting — achieving color combinations from the availability that we have to it,” says van Genderen.
She goes on to say that she now sees how Southern California artists, particularly painters, have influenced other artists in disparate locations such as Berlin and New York City. She believes this historical and present-day cross-pollination of artists, whether it’s Southern California artists moving to other cities (David Reed and Mary Heilmann moving to New York, for example) or vice versa (German painters such as Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger moving here), has only served to make her distinct style of abstraction more readily embraced, both here and abroad.
“I was doing a lot of shows in Europe and I was always billed as this L.A. import,” says van Genderen. “And not in a bad way at all, just that I was bringing this breeze of Southern California to these dark European towns. It felt funny, but good, and sometimes the work was better understood that way. It’s sometimes easier for people to accept my work in those contexts.”
Combs is a freelance writer.
“Paintings” by Monique van Genderen
When: Opens Saturday and runs through July 15. Hours, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays
Where: Quint Gallery, 7655 Girard Ave., La Jolla
Phone: (858) 454-3409
ission: Free
Online: quintgallery.com
