Artist, Marlene Dumas: Immaculate is one of my paintings that I don’t know how quite to speak about, because I do believe that not all things necessarily should be said. I do believe in secrets also. And because I work so much with so personal aspects in my life and I intertwine it with public things.
The concrete source material that I used was from an old book of French photographs.
I have never made big paintings of sexual parts. In this case, if it would be a big painting, it would totally lose the sense of pulling you into a sort of intimate space. Because I find it a very intimate painting. I wrote something about it:
Immaculate
I’m not moved, he said. It’s just static.
It’s too sad, I said.
As if no one ever entered there, I said
as if no one ever returned from there
as if it never has been used,
as if all color has gone from the inside,
has been drained.
This is not the origin of the world,
this is the end of the world.
I said I like my paintings to be very bare.
To be as minimal as a figurative work
could possibly be without being dead.
With the image forever resisting
the physical limitations of its frame,
its material conditions as a painted thing:
The paleness of the skin with the black-nippled corners.
The plane at the edges gives it a scale.
Without the edges it would be nothing, he said.
If a painting needs a world to object to,
an image needs edges to belong to.
She brings no news.
The only secret she has
is that you don’t love me anymore...