Johannes Vermeer now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age remained at his core a history painter, seeking to evoke abstract moral and philosophical ideas. Susanne Huseman, inspired by Vermeer’s classic allegorical works has created a clutch of contemporary allegory paintings which she exhibited recently at VM Gallery, Karachi.

For Huseman it is thoughts of home and identity that prompt her to revisit Vermeer. She initiates a dialogue with the history and culture of that era through Vermeer’s art to extract answers that appeal to her sensibility of a contemporary painter. Her impressions that appear as hazy excerpts of Vermeer’s allegorical art carry imprints of her own thoughts also coded as allegories.

An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. It is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. This allegorical approach enables Huseman to relate with the past and the present simultaneously to establish a ‘then and now’ equation. Her works are largely woman centred with an emphasis on domestic interiors and this connects directly with Vermeer’s themes.

Technically Vermeer is extolled for his masterly portrayal of radiant light and application of complex perspectives in his works but he also drew his inspiration from his observations of everyday life. Vermeer painted endearingly exquisite scenes of middle-class households. Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft, they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women.

It is this aspect of women at work, in reverie, playing an instrument or simply together that has most impacted Huseman. She extracts snippets, mainly figurations of women, from such paintings and builds on them in accord with her present-day thoughts, moods and moments. Use of stickers and tape with odd writings, questions and musings scribbled on the sides of the works reveal her reflective state of mind. Phrases and fragments like, “Everything is temporal but what is time – a picture is a picture but what is a picture?” or “Everything is the end product but what is time?” and “No time, no picture, no art, no history” are some of the queries she has jotted on the ends of her paintings.

Huseman’s choice of materials varies from the traditional to the most contemporary. She has exhibited 15, oil on cardboard paintings, four on canvas, and 14 on wood. Canvas and wood are conventional painterly supports but use of torn sheets of cardboard can lead to several assumptions. Painting on a cardboard sheet originally belonging to a packing carton speaks of transitions and displacements peculiar to artists recording dislocations, movements and shifts. Cardboard is also symbolic of contemporary populist culture which thrives on the use of the common and the banal.

During the height of his career, in paintings depicting women reading or writing letters, playing musical instruments, or adorning themselves with jewellery, Vermeer sought ways to express a sense of inner harmony within everyday life, primarily in the confines of a private chamber. In paintings such as ‘Young woman with a water pitcher’, ‘Woman with a pearl necklace’, and ‘Woman in blue reading a letter’, he utilised the laws of perspective and the placement of individual objects — chairs, tables, walls, maps, window frames — to create a sense of nature’s underlying order. This pertinent aspect is missing in Huseman’s extractions which are largely dominated by misty, blurred or out of focus portrayals. Hers is a distanced look of fleeting impressions.

Vermeer loved to grasp the private moment and built on it in intricate detail without losing the spontaneity of the original look or gesture. An onlooker viewing such confidential moments needs to slow down his gaze and thoughts for only then can he feel and appreciate the beauty and delicacy with which the artist has captured and frozen the scene for all times to come. Huseman’s hasty, gestural brushwork highlights Vermeer’s care and precision to advantage prompting viewers to initiate their own revisits of Vermeer.

Susanne Huseman has studied at University of Art Berlin and School of Art, Glasgow and has exhibited widely in Europe and the US.