Notes for a Wet Room

Marta Enkel’s second presentation with the gallery occupies The Annex with nine small paintings, all made in the last fourteen months, all completed in a single sitting.

Enkel’s rule is simple and unforgiving. A panel goes on the easel in the morning and comes off finished that night, or it is scraped down and reused. Nothing is worked into once it has dried. This means the paintings are made entirely wet into wet, in a state where every new decision damages the previous one, and it means that the version of the room you are looking at is the one that survived somewhere around hour twelve.

The rooms themselves are Dutch, rented, and mostly gone. Enkel has lived in eleven apartments since arriving in Amsterdam at twenty-two, and she paints from memory with occasional recourse to bad phone photographs taken for other reasons. Details arrive with unreasonable clarity, the specific brown of a bathroom tile, a light switch at the wrong height, and then the wall behind them fails to hold and becomes a plane of moving colour.

The wet room of the title is a building term, the part of a Dutch apartment that is allowed to get water on it. It is also an accurate description of the paintings’ physical condition for most of their existence. Enkel is suspicious of the reading that follows from this, in which the dissolving interior stands for a housing crisis or a life in transit, and she does not disallow it either. What she will say is that oil paint behaves very badly when you refuse to let it dry, and that this is the material fact the work is built on.

Notes for a Wet Room closes on Sunday 2 August.