Marie Cloquet – Traveling Light
 

The ambivalence of the ruin, the ruin that testifies of both great culture and its inevitable
decline. The wonder evoked by each and every ruin is always accompanied by a feeling of
deep melancholy. Every dilapidated monument, temple or church reminds us of the futility
of human endeavour, the finitude of every culture. They testify to the potency of great
cultures, yet simultaneously contain a warning to every self-aggrandizing culture that seeks
enduring fame. As such, our own (inescapable) future is already foreshadowed in the ruin.
 

Some ruins, however, do not arouse admiration or evoke melancholic humility, but only fill
us with horror. The work of Marie Cloquet (b. 1976) finds its origin in unexpected encounters
with these kinds of ruins. The overwhelming, almost sublime sight of discarded, twisted,
rusted shipwrecks in the Nouadhibou ship graveyard (Mauritania) was not an uplifting
spectacle. The decay visible here was not the result of a grand culture, but the residual
waste of a rapacious consumer society. They are the colossal remnants of a derailed
economic logic that has saddled us with a threatening ecological and humanitarian crisis.
There, on the sun-drenched beach of an African port city, the misconception upon which our
culture is based becomes painfully visible.

In the work of Cloquet, the ruin takes central place. This is evidenced not only in her subjects
(dismantled ships, harsh landscapes, dilapidated constructions, desolate places), but also
(and perhaps especially) in the way she constructs her images, layer by layer. Each work
starts from an analogue photographic recording made with a 35 mm camera. In the dark
room, the negative is projected via a slide projector onto photosensitive paper. The extreme
magnification makes that the print becomes grainy, the image diffuse. By partially dissolving
the image in the materiality of the photographic emulsion, the image already becomes a ruin
in itself. In the next step the artist selects, isolates and tears fragments from the existing
prints and subsequently brings them together as a collage in a new composition. This
composite image is finally treated one last time; using watercolours, the artist smoothens
harsh transitions or enhances, darkens or – inversely – brightens particular elements in the
image.

This layered process has a precise purpose: it actively counters the automatic aspect of the
photographic registration and its sober, matter-of-fact rendering of the world and infuses
the images with a more personal touch. Device versus hand, paint versus emulsion:
photography and painting challenge each other, affect each other. If photography, because
of its remarkable transparency, invites the viewer to step into the depicted world, this very
action becomes impossible in the work of Cloquet. The layers of paint on the image, the
rough edges of the torn pictorial elements, make it clear that what we are looking at is a
surface, an imagined world. It is this very field of tension that compels the viewer to take
position. Not the casual position of a machine that merely confirms what exists, but an
empathetic approach that questions what is shown.

 

Steven Humblet