Marie Cloquet. Around Obstacles

“The more I reflect on her work, the more it appears to me as 

a peculiar form of Land Art”, is how arthistorian Ory Dessau 

describes the art practice of Marie Cloquet. The artist put 

together an extensive archive of photographs and uses it time 

and again to create her monumental landscapes on canvas. 

She considers the images, both digital and analog, as sketches 

and sees similarities between her process and that of classical 

painters. Close to the way in which, for example, the Flemish 

masters arranged the sketches they made on site, once back in 

their studios, into new, realistic looking compositions, Cloquet 

cuts up and mixes her images into independent entities that 

remain only loosely connected with the real world. After 

manipulating the photos in the darkroom, she prints them on 

drawing paper, tears them up and reconstructs them collagewise, using watercolor paint. The rugged, anonymous worlds 

that emerge, play with scale, size and perspectives and simultaneously appeal, as places of devastation, to our collective 

memory. Marie Cloquet says, that at his core, her work is about 

collateral damage. If initially her pictures, mainly because of 

the analog production method, remained confined to the black 

and white spectrum, the artist has recently begun to gradually 

introduce color in her work. Subtle, pale and sketchy, so that 

the works tend towards the realm of the suggestive. It is an 

attempt to place a gentle veil over dramatic footage, to cover 

confrontational facts on the current state of the world and the 

human condition with a layer of beauty