Marie Cloquet. Around Obstacles

“The more I reflect on her work, the more it appears to me as
a peculiar form of Land Art”, is how arthistorian Ory Dessau
describes the art practice of Marie Cloquet. The artist put
together an extensive archive of photographs and uses it time
and again to create her monumental landscapes on canvas.
She considers the images, both digital and analog, as sketches
and sees similarities between her process and that of classical
painters. Close to the way in which, for example, the Flemish
masters arranged the sketches they made on site, once back in
their studios, into new, realistic looking compositions, Cloquet
cuts up and mixes her images into independent entities that
remain only loosely connected with the real world. After
manipulating the photos in the darkroom, she prints them on
drawing paper, tears them up and reconstructs them collagewise, using watercolor paint. The rugged, anonymous worlds
that emerge, play with scale, size and perspectives and simultaneously appeal, as places of devastation, to our collective
memory. Marie Cloquet says, that at his core, her work is about
collateral damage. If initially her pictures, mainly because of
the analog production method, remained confined to the black
and white spectrum, the artist has recently begun to gradually
introduce color in her work. Subtle, pale and sketchy, so that
the works tend towards the realm of the suggestive. It is an
attempt to place a gentle veil over dramatic footage, to cover
confrontational facts on the current state of the world and the
human condition with a layer of beauty