Marie Cloquet

“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