"The more I think about her work, the more it strikes me as a peculiar form of Land Art," is how art historian Ory Dessau describes Marie Cloquet's art practice.
The artist has built up an extensive archive of photos and uses them again and again to create her monumental landscapes on canvas. She considers the images, both digital and analogue, as sketches and sees similarities between her working method and that of classical painters. Just as the Flemish masters, for example, who arranged the sketches they made on location once back in their studio, into new, realistic-looking compositions, so Cloquet cuts and mixes her images into independent entities that remain only loosely connected to the real world.
After processing the photographs in the darkroom, she prints them on drawing paper, tears them and reconstructs them collage by collage with watercolour. The rough, anonymous worlds thus created play with scale, size and perspectives and at the same time, like places of destruction, appeal to our collective memory.
