Essay Art Collector Australia

Marie Le Lievre, Fruit (Tomes), 2025
oil on canvas
1020 x 1020 mm

“Painting,” says Maurice Denis in his in his essay “Définition du néotraditionnisme” (Art et Critique, 1890).), “is a flat surface covered with colours.” That accurately describes Marie Le Lievre’s oil Fruit (Tomes) (2025), yet it cannot explain the curious alchemy of what you are seeing, the wonderful mechanism of the composition. Perhaps T. S. Eliot comes closer: “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”.

Le Lievre describes this work as “pivotal in development of series where colour forms are still composed within the picture frame, as in previous works, however now packing out to the edges and running over. The oil colour forms pushing against each other yet contained as psychological compartments.”

The large planes of colour are asymmetrically counterbalanced by smaller ones, regulated by pressure, rhythm, interval, and hue in a displaced grid. Mondrian showed how that works, but he never let colour clot and bleed into itself like this. That is how we know the luscious oil medium is alive. The whole is animated by a spiralling vortex, though it is impossible to tell where it starts or ends.

The subtly pale blue area near the centre, the milkiest sky in a Tiepolo, is not a void but a breathing space into which flickers of blue penetrate, not from the petrol blue beside it but from a subtler field beneath. All of this is intuitive and immediate, part of Le Lievre’s physical, meticulous process.

Nothing is a single layer in Le Lievre’s paintings. What you cannot see matters as much as what you can. She readily covers some charming happenstance of medium and pigment with a darker layer, so it survives only as a hint at the edges. Everything interlocks so completely that it becomes hard to trace which colour lies over another.

That is what makes the painting so intensely psychological. Veils and buried secrets lie beneath the surface, like the conscious and unconscious. Perhaps this relates to the artist’s criminology studies, an attempt to give form to the mind’s inner workings. It recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs”: “An unregulated potential of a body… without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely.” Thus, liberated from geometry and self-consciousness, it feels organic and alive.

Like an Emily Dickinson poem, the painting is a compressed architecture of simple units stacked densely without explanation; ambiguity and semantic multiplicity held together by an almost neurotic surface tension – uncanny, inward, full of pain and hope. Every aspect of the palette is considered.

The internal textures of the blue and violet areas, and the muddied blot on the acidic orange zip, are offset by the pure pop of housemaid’s pink in the top right corner. A punctum, it smacks the retina like a camp Bergotte dying before Vermeer’s View of Delft, muttering about his patch of yellow wall. The orange and pink form a sudden vertical surge, rocketing out of the canvas to kick things off.

In the middle, two patches of green, one forest and one olive edging into khaki, defy the soft rectilinearity around them. Their shapes are poorly defined, more New England islands than the Midwest keystones that surround them. More chromatically integrated than the orange or pink yet strange enough to attract notice, they define the edge of the white negative space beside them like a vacuole in a cell.

You could spend a lifetime gazing at it and never grow bored.

Marie Le Lievre is represented by Two Rooms in Auckland where she has a solo exhibition from 16 July until 22 August.