Roseline Koener

by Deidre S. Greben, Catalogue Sonatas For A Dancing Heart, November 2012, Walter Wickiser Gallery, NY

Though constructed of handmade paper, pastel, ink, and pigments, Roseline Koener’s colorful abstractions evoke the opulent hues and warm, spiritual glow of stained glass. Unlike the chapel windows they conjure up, Koener’s compositions don’t dim interior light; instead, they project light from within.

         Equipped with a sense of wonderment inherited from her painter mother and a woodcock feather brush used by 15th-century Flemish painters given to her by her grandmother, the Belgian-born artist began to record from nature at an early age.  She went on to study art history, archaeology, and the classics, as well as in the studio at home and abroad.  It was not until 1992 however, when Koener became acquainted with the PRH Institute, a school for adult development, that her art changed direction.  It was no longer the object or model that concerned her, but the movement of the light revealing them.  Soon it was the internalization of the light, feeling the sensation, which became her true subject.

         The shift was also prompted by Koener’s increasing fascination with the pigments and patterns of indigenous art, initiated by her travels to Africa.  The primitive markings, the scratches and squiggles, across the surface of her works, are informed as much by tribal cultures, as they are by the local influences found in her current home on the South Fork of Long Island.  They are like traces in the sand, imprints made by seaweed, shells, and shoreline birds.  The region’s expansive light and the dancing movement of water are conveyed as well. 

The primal marks also evolve from what the artist terms her original child.  To be sure, the notions of play and the unexpected are integral to Koener’s exuberant patchwork paintings.  Her working process of emergence is intuitive; elements appear and then disappear according to dictates of color, shape, and texture.  Pillowcase snippets, bits of cardboard, scraps of wool overlay, peek through and juxtapose the paint and ink.  Aqua collides with indigo, chalky pink upstages tangerine, a shower of midnight blue dapples lavender, and acid yellow.

Koener’s free-flowing process of emergence and pictures anchor her work in solid ground.  The single-color bases give the works depth, connect their parts, and circulate the energy, which can also act as a type of frame in many of the images, such as with, the thick black border in At Night A Royal Dress from Origins and the medley of purples defining the edges of Sonatas for A Dancing Heart.  Koener’s titles often reflect the lyricism of her compositions, melding passages punctuated by staccato rhythms, layers upon layers of color building to a harmonious crescendo

Throughout, Koener nods to big-name abstractionists: the musicality and childlike imagery of Paul Klee, the fluidity and expressive color of Henri Matisse, the soft, evanescent washes of Helen Frankenthaler.  For qualities beyond the formal she looks to Mark Tobey’s mysticism, to Joan Miro, and to Robert Motherwell’s illumination of the subconscious.

Roseline Koener’s works shine from within.  They celebrate LIFE, they celebrate LIGHT, and they offer strangers spiritual refuge.

-Deidre S. Greben

         Deidre S. Greben was the managing editor of ARTnews for close to a decade.  Currently a contributing editor of the magazine, she has also written for such publications as Newsday art + Auction, Smithsonian Magazine, Elle Décor, and The New York Times.  She has also edited several exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art.