Marie Rioux
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
I like artworks to be enigmatic. For me, representation and abstraction are closely tied up with one another: nature and mind. They are the fundamental elements of the human being. There was a time in my life when my work was openly abstract. Today I never decide in advance whether I will make a figurative or an abstract work. That depends on the moment. Take for example“ La Tête dans les Nuages”(“ Head in the Clouds”). At first there were no figures. What interested me, against the Zen background of the land, close to abstraction, was to create a vibration in the water with the contrasting colour of fluorescent orange acrylic next to the greengrey oil paint. This fluorescent orange is a symbol of the artificiality present in our landscapes, so heavily occupied by people. In truth, I think I was the only one excited by this vibration. A few months later, arriving one day at my studio, I looked at my painting and found it empty. Spontaneously and precipitously, I took a tube of black paint and with a wide brush I painted three giants directly onto the work. In doing so, I relegated the land to the background in order to privilege, for the first time, human representation. a certain sense representative of the relationship between emotion and memory. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
The tones that condense your visual vocabulary and we have really appreciated the ethereal quality of your pieces. When we look at Troisiénne Rencontre Avant la Nuit we are struck by the atmosphere suggested by the darkness that saturates the canvass. Is this a reflection of you? Can you describe to me how this darkness that appears in your work connects to you personally? In particular, how do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works?