Park Avenue Art Studio, 's-Gravenhage

In the serie”Ava, boudoir of mystical delights” I convert every day objects, luxury articles into relics.

When I started this new series of paintings, months ago, invited by my good friend and gallery owner/ curator, Oswaldo Agudelo of D& G Art Design gallery, I was fascinated by the story of Ingrid Betancourt, the French Columbian politician who was kept hostage in the Jungle of Columbia by the FARC.

The newspaper article with her picture; sitting in the Jungle of Columbia: chained: motionless, like in trance, like life has left her; but somehow in her, somehow in Ingrid was an emerging universal strength, her letter dd: July 8th, 2008, to her mother, was related to every contemporary woman; this article which I keep like a treasure at my studio as well as her picture; The letter starts with: “ Rainy morning like my soul, my adored and divine mother of my soul, everyday I wake up thanking God that I have you”.
A Saint like image, her experience made her go through life’s sufferings we “normal” people don’t cope with; somehow her fear, made place for surrendering to God, whatever his plan was for her.

At the end of finishing my serie of paintings, I read about her liberation and decided to make the last painting of the serie about her:
This painting looks very contra dictionary to the other paintings of my serie, which have a surtain air of luxury, perfect world, but in Ingrid s painting she is holding a relic, the cattleya trianae orchid, the national flower of Columbia, like an relic, in all her suffering, she is holding on to something beautiful and she looks serene like all the other woman do in the paintings, she is close to the fantastic. When she returned into the free world, people considered her transformed.

Best Regards, MArjolein Van der Sluis
The Hague 2011