Marie Lannoo
There is a cool tremor of excitement in Marie Lannoo’s new work, like that gleaned from light breaking over a surface, like ruffled water or a modulating screen. These paintings, in the manner of a controlled experiment, create a context in the whiteness of an exhibition space in which to initiate dynamic observations of light. Their palpable sheen and reflectivity metaphorically connect with the contemporary sense of illusion housed now in the super-myth of the screen, our ultimate artifact, as overarching as the sky. The paintings done on a human scale reflect that reflection with our differences. It is the lateral movement of each beholder that sets each painting in motion, establishing the viewer as the container of space, rather than being contained by it—a nice inversion that is strategic.
Titles for Lannoo’s previous series of work (“See Nothing, See Everything,” “Through and Through and Through”) demonstrate a solid argument with Frank Stella’s front-line statement “What you see is what you get.” These new paintings are as fixed in their actuality as Stella’s; “what you get” is their projection, “what” emanates from their colour. Hence the show’s title: “In the Dirt with Eyes On the Stars”—starlight and dirt in equal measure.
The prefix “re” connects well with interpreting this work. “Re” modifies by attaching itself to verbs of action, of movement, relocating its subject against and through time to regain, restore and revolutionize. Lannoo intends to reconnect the viewer to the surface and intends the experience to move beyond the limit of the material. To accomplish this she experiments with reversing the standard structural apparatus so that the reflection caused by the viewer on the high-gloss surface becomes the painting, unique for each viewer. This is its humanistic trajectory. The staging is finely nuanced, like a cubist image, or a symbol in a poem by Wallace Stevens. The reaction to the domination of the screen is through reinvention rather than polemics; the paintings are both solemn and fun, heavy and light, sonorous and thrilling.
How does this new work achieve a straight-up rapport with the viewer? By folding and buckling. The “dirt” of the exhibition’s title is the ubiquitous calcium carbonate from which the mineral powder paper (the paintings’ support) is made. Heavier than wood pulp paper it maintains its integrity through multiple folds, and has enabled Lannoo to advance the aesthetic parameters of her paintings from those she’d previously done on Masonite panels. In that work the opulence of colour, the geometric play and the deep absorption of light were the significant actions. In this new body of work, each painting is composed of an individual network of folded lines protruding from and scored into the surface. The surfaces are richly saturated with flowing layers of paint, lyrically resonant and brashly flaring. The colours generally stay in the secondary range rather than veering into the high-impact registers of very artificial neon tones. The figurative play of light and colour thus connotes the natural, “the stars.” Material revelation minus religion. This manual act of folding enables the surface to project more dimensionality—physically and conceptually, and this amplification augments the interaction with the viewer. As you move laterally the impressions of light and colour change. The folds act like the tesserae in a Byzantine mosaic, where there is no fixed point of perspective and the emanation of light itself is the subject. Here, human interaction with light, not divine intercession or metaphysics, is what is possible. The refractions mirror the angle of the viewer’s gaze. Shifting gains different views with changing intensities—blues turning turquoise turning green for example. In the monochromatic, primary colour pieces, the experience moves from depth to sheer deflection. You try to find the best vantage point and then realize it is all one: yours.
The work doesn’t decide on a particular outcome; it searches and playfully makes many aesthetic references: utopian Modernism, colour field and gestural painting, minimalism, commodification. The larger aesthetic import is, perhaps of necessity, inchoate but the ground on which to ask, the folded-ground, is solidly established. The folds function as the decentring act of the show and are more utilitarian than idealistic, positive in their commitment to communicate. The act of looking is progressive, especially so when the viewer’s awareness that the visual roams uncontrollably is inbuilt. The upshot of the praxis is self- reliance, the personal demonstration of light wandering over surface, seen to another place, shared in the stars. ❚
“Marie Lannoo: In the Dirt with Eyes on the Stars” was exhibited at Newzones gallery, Calgary, from May 11 to June 29, 2013.
T. Hardy is a freelance writer living in Nelson BC.