concepts: they point to the silence of precise, patient, curious, and enjoyable contemplation.

Not space in the sense of the all-encompassing continuum, the great shell everything has been placed into, but space
in its smallest unit. Space from close up, space as a distance, as a gap, as the difference between front/back or
inside/outside

Space is interim space for Tabatabai, the thing "between" things that is revealed through a concentrated view from up
close. What do we see there? "What you see is what you see", perhaps? Really? Frank Stella's statement 1, quoted
thousands of times, simply implodes in this respect. What you see is precisely not what you see, not yet, no longer...
You have to look more closely, get as close as you can and look steadily until you can see the seeing itself, watch
yourself as you l ook, in order to perceive, for example, that the stripes in Tabatabai's "Thread Paintings" are not on
the painted surface, but have only been placed there by the eye. Where the threads are the same color as the
background, zones of uncertainty come about that make us wonder where front and back are, where the figure and
the ground are located.

A further moment of tension is the deviation from the stereometric ideal, the partially slightly rounded surfaces, the
avoidance of right angles.

The fragmentary character of her drawings Nelleke Beltjens continues to emphasize is something that causes us to
assume an imaginary whole. We could point to the composer Pierre Boulez, who once posed the rhetorical question
whether the real work were not to some extent a more or less random fragment of a large, imaginary, virtual work,
whose beginning and end we do not desire to know. 7

As we move through towns and cities we randomly perceive faades, behind which lay hidden
interiors with incredibly different characters and impacts. The shells of the buildings function as
filters between within and without, serving to bind or separate the private and the public, to draw
a line between exposed spaces and secluded retreats.