Marien Schouten

Groene Kamer (Green Room) is the most monumental and architectonic work that Marien Schouten has produced up to now. His plan to create an entirely tiled space came about in 2000, when he received an invitation to spend a period working at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in ’s-Hertogenbosch. On the basis of his concern for architecture, Schouten arrived at the idea of creating a wall tile with which he could organize an entire space. He himself says that he wanted to connect the ‘painterly space’ with ‘the architecture of the space in which the painting is located’ and thereby abolish the definition of the space in terms of the ‘unstable balance and unresolved tension’ of the painterly and the architectonic. While normally a tile wall would have a purely ornamental function within architecture, Schouten uses the tiles for a complete determination of the space. 

On entering Groene Kamer through its inconspicuous doorway, we arrive in a spacious and high chamber whose walls are completely covered with tiles glazed in a deep shade of green. And we are immediately absorbed in the work. The tiles hang in a staggered motif, horizontally, with the edges over each other, while the corners have been rounded off with special curved tiles. The addition of the word Slang (Snake) in the title refers to the pattern of ‘scales’ and, at the same time, expresses the type of movement that is inherent in this austere pattern. Within the regular order and rhythm of the framework, countless nuances of color do emerge. The green ‘skin’ has come about due to the slight copper content in the glaze. Throughout the firing process, the copper crystallizes; this produces a metallic effect. The blotchy marks are different on each tile and can be controlled only partly during the production process.

Schouten continually reverts to the aesthetic and stylistic principles developed by modernists such as the architect H.P. Berlage, Mondrian, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman. His show of respect, however, is always an equally deliberate tainting of their purely idealist views. Schouten uses conflicting pictorial principles – such as figure and background, transparency and opacity – in juxtaposition and in combination with each other, not with the intention of joining or blending them, but in order to distinguish them as equivalent components. Never does one predominate over the other; everything that the painter employs retains its intrinsic value. Schouten therefore often gives his painting sculptural or even architectonic characteristics; here the functional and the ornamental, once considered incompatible, no longer exclude each other. This ‘unresolved’ quality of his work implies a challenge to modernist principles.