How the color marvel me
By Akiko Kotani and Bernard Freydberg, Fiber Arts Magazine: Sept. 2004
Roseline Koener is passionate about sharing beauty, her creative "fire," and the work of other artists.
How can one best describe Roseline Koener? She is steady, always-moving center in a whirlpool of creativity and idealism. She is artist, gallery owner, friend, and supporter of other artists; gracious cultivator of talent of all kinds; true believer in the redemptive and healing power of art. Koener’s unflappable cheerfulness and unimpeachable integrity are joined with distinctive aesthetic signature. She brings all of these elements together into a holistic philosophy of life in which beauty stands at its heart.
I am proud to say that she represents my work. We first met in 2002 at the opening of the Small Works exhibition at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York, in which one of my piece was shown. Through conversation with her, I learned that several of the artists whose work she handled also had pieces in the exhibition, and that she had her own atelier. I soon learned that she was also a fine artist in her own right.
Much of Koener’s art embrace fiber, especially handmade paper. Her paper and torn-paper collages sometimes include antique handkerchiefs, pieces of fabric, washed-out and faded household linens, pillowcases, dishtowels, cotton sheeting, and lace. Her body of work consists of pieces of all sizes, from very small to very large. One of her more soaring works, which recently traveled through Mexico and can be seen in her atelier through the end of September, exemplifies the synthesis of Roseline Koener the person.
Titled Let Us Live as Children of the Light, the piece stands 15 feet high and 6 ¼ feet wide. To compose the piece, Koener kept an “artistic diary” of her inner life for six months. The pages of this unusual diary consisted of brightly colored drawings and paintings on handcrafted Nepalese paper, noted for its sturdy roughness. For her striking colors, she employed materials crafted by the Parisian firm Sennelier, which, since 1880, has been a purveyor of pure pigments. The inks employed by Koener contain a minute amount of oil (the formula is Sennelier’s own) and contribute significantly to the blazing intensity of her palette. In her words, “The transparency of the pigments mixed with the whites of egg makes the superimposition of the different colors visible; it corresponds well with my desire for depth and transparency…”
The Roseline Koener Atelier is located in Westhampton, about twenty-five miles from LongHouse on a verdant, elegantly landscaped, and secluded piece of land. The atelier features a very high ceiling, ample and well-placed wall space for exhibitions, indoor and outdoor areas for receptions, a substantial kitchen, and Koener’s own studio, where she produces work that has been prominently exhibited nationally and internationally.
Whereas her previous gallery in the Westhampton Beach shopping district (Roseline Koener Gallery, open 1999 to 2003) was devoted solely to visual arts, the new atelier can include both dance and musical concerts. The atelier also serves as the site of workshops that Koener has been leading for the nonprofit institution Personalité et Relations Humaine: An International School for Adult Development (PRH) since 1970. Koener explains, “The PRH curriculum focuses on the development of the being, the positive core of each person.” Her goal is having the beauty to which she is so dedicated more fully enter the lives of others.
Koener was born near Brussels, Belgium, where she received thorough classical training in European art. Ever wishing to be freed from the constraints of convention, Koener’s art is about the history she brings to her work.
Her current work can be seen partly as an evolution from her classical background and partly as a revolution- from it. Concerning the evolution, she says, “It has been a long, hard road of study and patience-heavily influenced by the study of great masters over a long period of time.”
A sojourn to Africa in 1982 constituted a turning point in Koener’s life. The energy of the people, the uninhibited vibrancy of the colors, the blossoming health of artistic expression that informed all aspects of the community life, the renewed contact with the earth unfiltered by the simulacra of European modernity-all of these elements took their place in her now more complex history. New colors and shapes emerged in her work. Koener’s recent one-person exhibition, which was displayed from December 2003 to June 2004 at the Luxembourg House in New York City, eloquently combined the language of European modernism with the primordial fire inspired by her African journey.