A Dangerous Undertaking

The art of restoration

Article

No. 35 • September 2024

When Charlotte Caspers began cleaning and reconstructing a sculpture over five hundred years old, she was surprised by what lay hidden beneath the dust and ancient layers of paint. "Something resembling friendship began to form."

text: Charlotte Caspers

Fig 1. Charlotte Caspers, Beyond Landscape (detail), 2021, bladgoud 23 ¾ karaat (watervergulding) op magnolia-paneel, 101 x 132cm

In the summer of 2001, after studying medieval art history, I began my training as a restorer of paintings and polychrome objects in Maastricht. On the second day of the five-year program, six beautiful medieval polychrome statues of saints were lined up in the workshop. Each student was assigned one to clean and restore. Strangely enough, up until that moment, I had mainly viewed ‘art’ as an illustration of the grand ‘history of mankind’ – perhaps I should have known better, especially since I drew and painted myself. Still, the tangible aspect came as a surprise. This was a real statue, created more than five hundred years ago, an object that you could lift, weigh, touch, and even drop. Moving a statue from the display table to my worktable felt like a dangerous undertaking.

After the first encounter with the statue, something that could be called friendship began to form. All the hours, days, and weeks I spent working on the statue helped me get to know it better. Every little spot, I had seen and touched with my hands, but also with my eyes. The statue was damaged, and much of the paint had worn off. But I was rewarded for my efforts when color emerged from under the gray dust layers. The face of the saint turned out to have been painted delicately, with soft transitions and subtle blushes on the cheeks. The surface of this paint skin was hard, smooth, and easy to clean. The matte blue surface of the mantle, however, behaved very differently. My cotton swab kept catching on the small curled paint flakes. This paint was brittle and porous. Before I could begin cleaning, each patch of paint had to be carefully flattened and glued down.

Fig 2. Charlotte Caspers, Woad, 2023, pigment in gazelijm op lindenpaneel, 42,5 x 32,5cm

In parallel with the restoration, I worked on reconstructing a part of “my” statue: I replicated it as precisely as possible using materials and tools that mimicked the fifteenth-century practices. As students, we studied historical texts, but because many of the secrets of materials and craft cannot be expressed in words, we also received guidance from a woodcarver and an experienced polychrome restorer. The idea behind this reconstruction exercise was that ‘feeling’ the process would lead to a better understanding of the historical object.

The soft, smooth lime wood, the scent of wet chalk, the slipperiness of a warm layer of glue, and the scratching of pigment on a grinding stone are sensory experiences that connect the present with the past. Human concentration and touch bend with the physical properties of these natural materials. I saw “my” statue being reborn, young, fresh, and colorful next to its damaged self, and I fell in love with the material, with repeating actions, and the insights that emerged from this process.

Now, more than twenty years later, I still use materials and techniques that were common in ancient and medieval times as an independent artist. I don’t want to let them go because they communicate with the viewer in a very elemental way and inspire me. With polished golden surfaces and layered, often monochrome, pigment fields, I explore the fundamentals of painting: light, matter, and touch.

Cahrlotte Caspers, Come Closer, Sint Bavo, Gent, 2020, met links een rontgen van het middenpaneel van het Lam Gods uit 1432 van de gebroeders van Eyck, dat tussen 2016 en 2020 gerestaureerd werd

Fig 3. Cahrlotte Caspers, Come Closer, Sint Bavo, Gent, 2020, met links een rontgen van het middenpaneel van het Lam Gods uit 1432 van de gebroeders van Eyck, dat tussen 2016 en 2020 gerestaureerd werd

The shiny gold acts as a mirror, reflecting the image of the viewer and incorporating it into the work. At the same time, the gold surfaces overcome their two-dimensional limitations by, in various ways, interacting with the light in the space, casting their own reflection onto the viewer. The pigment-rich monochromes, due to their matte quality, are the opposite of the gold. They are layered and have an open surface, making the color intense and allowing the viewer’s gaze to penetrate. I see them as landscapes with their own geology. During the making process, I often realize that early painting emerged from a subtle dance between man and nature: one eager and imaginative, the other revealing itself more and more.

Fig 4. Charlotte Caspers, Portrait

Charlotte Caspers is an artist with a background as a painting restorer. She has restored works for various museums, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Tate in London.

Caspers’ work is on display until May 11, 2025, in the exhibition In de rug van de zee — Honderd jaar verbeelding van het landschap in en rond Bergen at Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, and from October 12, 2024, to March 16, 2025, in the exhibition Uit het paradijs at Museum Krona in Uden.