Geachte Heer,

I have thought and thought and racked my brain over Pat Rosenmeier’s work. You wrote me that I would be able to say something about it, because I am so familiar with the view from “above” in the works of Delaunay, Smithson and Panamarenko. In your opinion, Rosenmeier’s paintings also have something to do with flying. But what exactly is that really: flying? When you sit in an airplane, you never feel that you are flying at that moment. Actually we never fly, except in our dreams. Rosenmeier precisely depicts these dreams. She gathered her first experiences of flying as a teenage fledgling pilot, and she still looks at the world from above today, many hours per year. It is surely a kind of escapism, but it also points to Rosenmeier’s own interpretations of her painting. And it is a way of looking at things that is not granted to many painters as an ever-present viewpoint. When looking at reproductions of her work, they initially appear to be photographs, but they are actually paintings. She describes this in a specific manner: Her decision to work with paint is related to the fact that this is the only medium in which she sees herself in a position to also realize her specific ideas in images. Paintings differ sharply from photographs. Every medium has its own minefield. With this in mind, I have noticed that Rosenmeier is trying to find out what goes on between the paint and the brush. Good paintings consist of unique moments. When I look at her works, they seem to be a mixture of calculating, deliberate, physical processes and the painterly application of color (the art of painting). The artist also admits this. It is no coincidence that she alludes to Pollock. He was, of course, also passionately occupied with controlling the effect of “running” color. In the work of Pat Rosenmeier, we stand before a seemingly cosmic reality, in which the viewer’s eye seems to become lost in the work, but nonetheless searches for a point of orientation — specifically at a point that lies behind the surface of the layer of paint.

Jan Hoet, Gent 2010