Annie Gentils Gallery

Marie Cloquet' large-scale hybrid paintings are neither paintings nor photographs, but an unclassified overlap of both. By reconstructing the places where they were begotten, Cloquet's landscapes ignore the dividing line distinguishing nature from culture, the organic from built.
The artists interplay of Land Art, photography, and painting stages an event of declassification, an undifferentiated constellation of places and times, an idiosyncratic experience of the world. It combines varying registers of reality, undermining the distinction between phases of matter, between the animate and the inanimate, the substantial and the imaginary. It exercises a fluid, elastic state of things established upon a potential of primal energy through which everything can be recreated over again.

(Ory Dessau,2019).

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Featuring a new series of works on panel, the exhibition is conceived as a study for a possible landscape. An environment where time is given no clear indication. The works grab colorful yet inhospitable rock formations and reflect on the elusive aspect of time. The landscapes pit civilization against progress.

Cavemen is a reference to the cartoon character Alley Oop, the extremely strong and unbeatable king of the cave dwellers with whom the Hollywood Argyles scored a number one hit in 1960. David Bowie refers to it with the sentence Look at those cavemen go in Life on Mars (1971). The singer describes a gang of wildly flailing brawlers who don't seem to know who, what or where they are.