Anne Mariën: Landscapes Reimagined Through Sensation and Memory
Nature serves as the emotional vocabulary of Anne Mariën’s work, though never in a descriptive or illustrative way. Her paintings do not attempt to recreate mountains, oceans, forests, or skies as recognizable scenes. Instead, they communicate the sensation of encountering them physically and emotionally. Experiences gathered during extensive travels become internalized impressions that later resurface inside the studio through abstract forms, textures, and chromatic atmospheres. Mariën has traveled through countries celebrated for dramatic landscapes and immersive natural environments, including Norway, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia, Vietnam, Thailand, Panama, Argentina, Ecuador, Jordan, and Cape Verde. These journeys expose her to shifting climates, vast terrains, luminous coastlines, geological formations, and changing weather systems that leave emotional traces rather than visual snapshots. Once back in Belgium, her studio becomes a contemplative environment where those accumulated impressions are transformed into paintings. The resulting works communicate physical exposure to nature’s elements while resisting direct narrative or figurative translation. Through abstraction, she recreates emotional memory rather than visible geography.
This relationship with nature creates remarkable ambiguity throughout her compositions. Many paintings suggest aerial coastlines, underwater formations, microscopic organisms, weather patterns, volcanic surfaces, or cosmic expanses without fully resolving into identifiable imagery. That uncertainty encourages viewers to move continuously between macrocosmic and microscopic associations, between external environments and internal emotional states. Her paintings often feel suspended between earthly and cosmic dimensions, where paint behaves almost like water currents, vapor, sediment, erosion, or organic growth. Such fluidity gives her work a sense of constant transformation, as though each canvas captures a living process rather than a fixed image. Art collector and former Council of Culture member Frank Nobels described each artwork by Mariën as “a spirited attempt to grasp the totality of life,” a phrase that reflects the expansive emotional ambition behind her practice. The paintings carry an immersive quality because they are built from layered impressions accumulated through movement, observation, and emotional absorption rather than through direct visual imitation.
Several admired artists have also contributed to Mariën’s broader visual sensibility, including Gerhard Richter, Herbert Brandl, David Hockney, Mark Rothko, and Katharina Grosse. Yet despite echoes of postwar abstraction and gestural painting traditions, her artistic voice remains highly individual. Certain works may recall aspects of Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, or Tachisme, particularly in their fluid structures and energetic surfaces, but Mariën’s paintings possess a luminous warmth and regenerative energy that distinguish them from darker existential strains of abstraction. Her approach combines spontaneity with compositional balance in a way that feels instinctive rather than calculated. Radiant blues, mineral greens, volcanic blacks, vivid oranges, acidic yellows, and flashes of magenta interact dynamically across the canvas, creating emotional acceleration through color alone. Cooler compositions often generate translucent atmospheric depth, while warmer works radiate intensity and sensuality. Throughout all of them, there is movement toward illumination, renewal, and emotional openness rather than fragmentation or despair.
