All rights reserved: @Mariejon de Jong-Buijs, 2024
Almost a decade ago Mariejon de Jong-Buijs sat on a tractor equipped with a small tank and painted, or more precisely, she drove the tractor forward and back, repeatedly, over a 165 feet (50 meter) length of canvas, marking the surface with paint which flowed from a series of holes in a pipe attached to the tank, the paint running like fertilizer or herbicide or water. Mariejon de Jong-Buijs knew this kind of work—the careful control of the tractor, the constant looking forward and back, the patience and attentiveness that an otherwise apparently simple operation requires. Since her teens Mariejon de Jong-Buijs worked on
farms doing a variety of work. Tractor driving was a task she knew, a mode of being in the outdoors, a deep memory known in her body and on the skin.
Mariejon de Jong-Buijs’ process-based work are inspired by the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. Rather than representing the landscape, she aims to reconnect with it through memories, a time capsule with accumulated experiences and impressions. Her paintings are large-scale, often characterized by the use of saturated colors, geometric shapes, repetitive patterns and foldings of the canvas. In their foldedness, Mariejon de Jong-Buijs invites others to think about time and painting in a different way. A fold interrupts flatness, enclosing volume so that the painting’s surface is understood as pliable, indeed as something packable and unpackable as it exists in stretched and un-stretched formats.
The tractor’s movement back and forth across the length of canvas—its tracking, was the first of a range of means Mariejon de Jong-Buijs used to mark the canvas without a traditional brush. She is interested in the ways which paint can be used to create marks, inscriptions, and gestures through the use of non-traditional paint application. Like back-sprayers, brooms, she utilizes a full range of working tools in and outside the studio.
Mariejon de Jong-Buijs understands her “painting” as a process for carrying out specific actions to make the vicissitudes of the paint visible. Some works are executed outside; the weather plays its part too. The resulting work on canvas exposes the process, tools, materials and the act of movement.
Whatever the means used, all Mariejon de Jong-Buijs’ works to date are predicated on an attention to process as an unfolding in time, as a procedure for the performance of specific and generally repetitive actions, made across the canvas. Still working within the tradition of the painted canvas, Mariejon de Jong-Buijs is committed to exploring new ways of taking painting beyond the easel.
Basel, Switzerland
2024