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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Marlene Mocquet

Marlene Mocquet
Marlene Mocquet, at Freight + Volume - These were nice, and tied into the stuff written about in my long post that got deleted.

What is it called when you make stains, or drips, or find a splotch... and then make a picture from that? Is there a word? I know that there are/were specific surrealist techniques - like frottage, fumage, soufflage - that an artist can use as a basis for further refinement... but is there just a more general word?

Anyways, whatever the word is, that is what she seems to be doing here. Lots of play with paint, followed by more careful, but still playful, delineation... finding faces and animals and fantastical landscapes.

Marlene Mocquet
They are cute, and have the little girl thing going on... some of them could be illustrating fairy-tales... but the painting inventiveness, the embrace of chance and possible sloppy endings, keeps the saccharine from completely taking over.

Marlene Mocquet

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In psychology/psychoanalysis it's called Roschach (ink blots) (do they still do this?).
But the term automatism covers frottage and other Surrealist techniques.
I was troubled by these paintings; they were charming, but I thought they lacked a certain ambition. Maybe they weren't pretentious or bombastic enough for my taste. They seemed to undercut themselves more than really commit.

Anonymous said...

Is it Tachisme?

Anonymous said...

"As the master Boticelli stated, such a study is useful because just by throwing a sponge soaked with various colors against a wall to make a stain, one can find a beautiful landscape. If it is true that in this stain various inventions can be discerned, or rather what one wants to find in it, such as battles, reefs, seas, clouds, forests and other similar things, then surely, this is like the ringing of bells in which one can understand whatever one wants to. But, even though these smears of color provide you with inventions, they also show you that they do not come to represent anything in particular."

Leonardo

Anonymous said...

It is just working from projections. In Italy this technique was already used, as Leonardo that teached his students to paint a war scene, from a ground wall... Projection is basical painter exercise. She is good to do this kind of shit illustration, but is it more than just illustration? A lot of mondanities helped her to develop her arrogant mind, anyway... But for me it isn't painting, it is illustration for deficiant adults... Very cute for decorating children's room, specially rich ones...