Essay "Pigment of the Imagination" James Hope

Pigment of the Imagination

Substance

The oil paint is effusive, a fat lava, a dark coagulation upon the surface of the canvas. Luminous rivulets diffuse throughout an admixture of the recondite substance. The medium can be guided, quietly willed, but is ultimately, in such substantial quantities, ungovernable. Graphite, by contrast, is sharp, precise and controlled, determining form. The former of these is the Dionysian: unknown, chaotic and unpredictable. The latter is Appollonian, a medium of precision and order. These are their tendencies, and Marie performs the alchemy required to marry their opposites.

Time | Colour

The central strip running through Inventory is a canal of chroma, a highway of hue. It implies linear trajectory and progress, and spans one end of the work to the other, traversing a section of the artist's former output – a selection of past work, pieced together to create anew. This then requires decisions – which of this history could or should be surrendered, and once surrendered, what from within these volunteered works can be spared erasure, so their remnants suffuse the extant work as a quiet remainder?

Inventory’s strip contains the colours of the visible light spectrum, the source that makes possible the existence of painting and its power to affect. It is a direct and sincere tribute to the material itself – this is what makes it possible, this thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. Glorious. A rainbow bridge linking to whatever comes next.

Colour is a technology for the emotions, a shortcut for broadcasting interiority. The paintings achieve this in a rush through the retina, direct and emphatic. The drawings, in contrast, build a somnolent picture of domiciliary scenes, a multitude of recurring symbols interpolating the temperate compositions. Colour companions accompany the figures, sitting with, on and around their bodies. They are the visual representation of thought and feeling; the expenditure of energy; the weary kinetic residue of exertion.

Dorsal Dec(hue)bitus | Hands

In photographs Marie lies in Shavasana, and here is enveloped in a chromatic cocoon. Maybe not so trite as to suggest the metaphorical flowering process from caterpillar to butterfly, but a direct expression of a continual concern that runs throughout her practice – revealing and concealing. Spending so much time near the floor during the creation process might occasion an ontological shift, where the ground becomes the catalyst for higher thought, in a reversal of the trajectory of human evolution from closer to the earth to reaching upright and its attendant ramifications for our consciousness.

In the drawings figures lie prone – in sleep, meditation or deep relaxation. Others are slumped in exhaustion (or a stupor)? There is a turning within, to search for oceanic currents swelling underneath the phrenic surface. Hues spill from limbs and extremities. Thoughts decant themselves from cranium to floor. 

In a collaborative filmic homage to manual dexterity, the artist’s hands busy themselves with the life that feeds the art. Often, the unmitigated hands are Marie’s means of creating – no mediating tools. On film hands take pleasure in engaging the world’s texture, and in their own agile anatomy. They choreograph, nourish, perform ablutions, and soothe. What hands cannot do is conceal the effects of time. And time can be written indelibly on the hands from one’s choice of career… 

Multum in Parvo

Painting is the ‘much in little’, that with economy of means can pry open perception to an immensity, an otherworldliness that Marie believes we all know is there, but are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge. In The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges attempted to describe an encounter with the eponymous object that reveals everything everywhere all at once; the experience unfathomable and impossible to relay in prose, but in the course of the description evokes epiphanies via association: “... a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal…the circulation of my dark blood…” In another way is Marie attempting something similar? She is painting in spite of the jittery excesses of contemporary life. Attention reserves get relentlessly chipped away during the course of a day by today’s multum in parvo, the nervous little black tablet vibrating in everyone’s pocket. Inventory’s rejoinder is: how about undertaking a search without an engine?