On Marie Cloquet’s Squared Circle, and beyond
To some extent, Marie Cloquet’s practice follows Gerhard Richter’s famous conception of painting after photography, obtained by the German artist through the imperative not to use the latter ‘as a means to painting, but to use painting as a means to photography.’ Marie Cloquet not only paints over photographic prints, she also paints with photographic fragments by tearing up photographic prints into patches and welding them together on a material support in a way that amounts to an image situated on the verge between collage and décollage. However, Cloquet’s art practice stays away from the confrontational method of collage artists who juxtapose elements anchored in different contexts, as well as from the advertisement billboard aesthetics of décollage artists, to explore and reiterate the inconsistency of a single image, a single sight. Cloquet’s recent work pushes forward and develops the inner logic of her practice as a constant exchange between photography, painting, and (dé)collage. In the last four years, this exchange has abandoned the confinements of a mere pictorial production, and expanded into real space. Cloquet’s recent works are no longer bound by a frame, nor are they necessarily mounted onto the wall. Instead, they function as a free-standing sculptural screen (or panel) that addresses the viewer, relying on and responding to the architectural givens of the physical exhibition space. This is clearly exemplified by the current version of the work Squared Circle (2024), originally conceived in 2020 as a cylindrical, 360-degrees panorama of a volcanic landscape enveloped by a closed cube whose four visible facets were covered by images of derelict urban environments. Each of the facets was perforated with a round hole through which one could observe a segment of the volcanic landscape.
The 2020 version of Squared Circle was moving the viewer back and forth in a sort of zoom-in/zoom-out between the near urban environment, in itself publicly overlooked and therefore somehow remote, and the remote volcanic landscape, in itself hidden and inaccessible yet never fully suppressed and insistently resurfacing. Squared Circle (2020) functioned as a mechanism of interconnectedness reminiscent of contemporary communication systems governing our world, and as a manifestation of distance and sharp borders. At the same time the work exposed how behind every image (or space) lies another, seemingly unconnected latent image (or space) awaiting to appear. The work’s current version opens up the enclosed squared circle, and reemerges as a curved screen unfolding panels of the urban environments and the volcanic landscape in an intertwined, semi-cinematic sequence running through two of the exhibition spaces of Zebrastraat. Cloquet’s Squared Circle features some of the main aspects of her practice, above all, the fact that she deals with natural landscapes and man-made environments on the same level, demonstrating how they both belong to one (interrupted) continuum.
The distinction between nature and culture, or rather, between the natural state and the cultural/civilised state, was obviously created by culture. While occupied with the artificial conditions of social life, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) were speculating on a pre-social life while perceiving a hypothetical abstraction about human nature prior to the cultural state of civilisation. This led to a fundamental split in early modern philosophy of nature vs culture, of a natural, untouched, harmonious world presumably preceding the artificial, constructed, relational world of society.
By entwining urban environment and volcanic landscape, Cloquet’s work deconstructs this dichotomy of nature vs culture, elucidating how our notion of nature was born out of culture, how our idea of uncorrupted nature was retroactively invented by culture, it also establishes an opposite perspective subjecting culture to nature, namely, to erosion, disintegration, dissolution, and eventually, disappearance. Cloquet’s practice ridicules culture’s pretension to permanence, persistence, and immortality. In this sense, her work can be regarded in affinity to the field of studies known as the Anthropocene. Literally, the term “Anthropocene” means the “age of man”. It refers to the imprint of human kind on nature, distinguishing the age of man from previous geological epochs. The Anthropocene points to a profound transformation in our ecosystem, in light of which human life is part of an experiment conducted on planet earth and its inhabitants. The thought of the Anthropocene undermines the distinction between the human and the natural. It no longer considers water, land, and air as the transparent backgrounds of all human activities, but as operative factors, in relation to which world history cannot be exclusively described as a battle between ideologies and social forms. The Anthropocene examines human culture and political life from the point of view of nature.
Cloquet’s work renders nature and culture indistinguishable from one another through the concept of “the ruin”. The ruin allows her to incorporate a derelict human environment into the law of nature, according to which everything is ephemeral and temporary. In Cloquet’s work, the ruin is both content and practice. The works not only depict ruins, they are topographies of a ruin, an enactment thereof. A correspondence of form and content, they stem from discarded sights, but they are also made as an act of ruining, patching together torn fragments of discarded sights marked by the wreckage of history and human damage, or by natural disastrous phenomena. When applied with liquid paint, and layered with areas of chromatic intensity, Cloquet’s cracked topographies of ruin undergo revivification, springing out. More than a means of smoothening the cracks, Cloquet’s recent works utilise colour as a means of adapting to the cracks, living with and from them. The colours applied to the surface recall the biblical story of Moses hitting a rock, which then produced water for the Israelites suffering famine. The coloured areas turn the rocky topography into a wellspring.
By working through and with the materiality and visibility of the ruin, Cloquet’s practice suggests an ethical stance, defying the underlying concept of human history as a linear progress in time. Cloquet’s work avoids the false image of overcoming and reconciliation. It conducts a process of accumulating fragments and broken pieces into a multi-temporal topography where the ruins of the past continue to prevail in the present. It offers a mode of remembrance and recollection. In contrast to the aestheticised ruin of Albert Speer (1905-1981) who designed buildings as glorious future ruins, Cloquet’s ethical approach to ruins reflects humility, taking into account the frailty and fragility of life and culture. It locates the topography of ruins as the consequences of pursuing growth, and as a way to oppose this pursuit while lingering on the catastrophe of history, while pointing to the catastrophe to come. Her work could be considered an expression of silent urgency with regard to the instability and turbulence all of us face nowadays. Rather than positioning itself as an external representation thereof, Cloquet’s work is determined by the logic of the world as a persistent, continuous ruin. For Cloquet, the topography of the ruin enables her work to circulate through different times, at once looking forwards and backwards, bringing together different places, superimposing the near and the remote, defining each in terms of the other.
Ory Dessau 2024
The Search for the New Land
Preliminary Notes on Marie Cloquet’s Work
The more I reflect on Marie Cloquet’s work, the more it appears to me as a peculiar form of Land Art. In her work, Cloquet creates new landscapes by altering and modifying real landscapes. She intervenes in the landscape, rearranging it, rendering it indistinguishable from the images within which it is generated, the papers on which these images are printed, etc.
Cloquet’s images are not representations of landscapes that exist outside the images. They are collage driven hybrid landscapes, both actual and illusionistic, made of, in, and by fragments and patches of real landscapes. They turn segmented elements of landscapes into pictorial elements, and the other way around. In this sense, one should refer to Cloquet’s work as a physical act of photographic dislocation, transposition, reconstruction.
The Image of Cloquet’s work cannot be defined as an outcome of optical recording or purely visual organization. It stems from a material friction shifting the artist’s body between a variety of textures, phases of matter, and topographies. It is a tactile, haptic, corporeal entity, an inconsistent hybrid landscape whose textural, chemical, and topographical shifts expose the viewer’s field of vision to the cracks therein. Due to the different landscapes it welds together, the Image of Cloquet’s work engenders ruptures and rifts along the stitching lines between them. It deconstructs the notion of the Image and our perception of the world as a persistent, regulated picture.
Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes are more than a constant exchange between physical intervention and photographic dislocation. They also function as a material support, as the ground surface of watercolor paintings. When absorbed in transparent layers of watercolors, Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes undergo an additional transformation, becoming a screened image, a process of appearance emerging through a transparent partition, and at the same time, a hazy sight behind layers of watercolors. The transparent screen of watercolors smoothens the cracks between the different photographic landscape patches, consolidating them into an image of evocation. It assumes their appearance through the transparent screen of the watercolors as a result of recollection. However, it also pushes the landscapes backwards, keeping them behind the transparent screen as an indication of a failed recollection, as an elusive vision. Paradoxically, the painterly transparent screen of Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes does not operate as a fictional artificial factor but opens them up to a horizon of memory. It situates them in affinity to the category of the archive, yet, concurrently, it incorporates this category into procedures of obscurity, of screening, of loss.
The painterly element of Cloquet’s work marks her strive for color against the black & white background of her landscapes. The rare and short trails of colors hovering above her colorless photographic topographies throw us back to the days following the invention of (black & white) photography, and of hand-painted photographs as a means of reviving images. They recall Jean-Luc Godard’s statement that photography and cinema were born as a melancholic expression of mourning, that initially their black & white imagery was a demonstration of loss.
Cloquet’s 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
Travelling Light van Marie Cloquet in galerie Annie Gentils, Antwerpen.
Ze was in 2005 met de auto naar de westkust van Afrika gereisd en tot aan de baai van Nouadhibou geraakt, de op één na grootste stad van Mauretanië. Hier in de buurt zwalpten in 1816 op hun vlot de overlevenden van het gezonken fregat dat Théodore Géricault inspireerde tot zijn beroemde schilderij Le radeau de la Méduse.
Wellicht ontsnapten de slavernij, het racisme, het radicale islamisme en de barakken van gestrande vluchtelingen in Nouadhibou niet helemaal aan de aandacht van Marie Cloquet (43), maar het beeld van het reusachtige scheepskerkhof dat zich voor haar ogen uitstrekte: dat was de overweldigende ervaring die haar het jaar daarop deed terugkeren – en later nog enkele malen. Begiftigd met de gevoeligheid van een kunstenaar deden de schots en scheef uit de zee stekende of op het strand gestapelde wrakken, de ruwe rotsen en de door striemende winden overal indringende zandkorrels bij haar de behoefte ontstaan om te tekenen.
Zo zou ook pakweg William Turner (1775‐1851) te werk zijn gegaan, gedreven door de drang om de schoonheid van ongerepte landschappen eerst vluchtig te schetsen, om er zich na de reis in het atelier door te laten inspireren tot lichtende schilderijen die de idee van het sublieme oproepen. Marie Cloquet trof de kust in Nouadhibou allesbehalve ongerept aan. Menselijk en materieel een gigantische puinhoop, maar beeldend net zo sterk als Turners besneeuwde bergtoppen en azuurblauwe meren in de Alpen. Na de reis, in het atelier, raapte zij haar schetsen van het verhakkelde landschap bijeen, filterde ze uit en liet ze transcenderen tot schilderijen van een lelijkheid zo adembenemend dat ze de schoonheid bijna naar de kroon steekt. Dat komt eerst en vooral omdat Cloquet, net als Turner, eigenlijk het licht al het werk laat doen. Er is licht in de hemel, maar ook in de hel. Het volstaat om het op de juiste manier te laten indringen, tot de dingen hun zwaarte verliezen en opgaan in een illusie. Overtuig uzelf ervan op de expo ‘Traveling light’.
Ze schetst noch schildert op de gewone manier. Schetsen betekent voor haar fotograferen in zwart‐wit. In de donkere kamer worden de beelden heel groot op de muur geprojecteerd, zodat ze een korrelig aanschijn krijgen. Ze kiest er bepaalde zones uit en overplakt ze met papier, ingestreken met een fotografische emulsie, een lichtgevoelige laag. Die stukken worden gescheurd, belicht en ontwikkeld in verschillende baden. Dan komt de fase die Cloquet schilderen noemt: met de gekozen fragmenten stelt ze een monumentaal beeld samen dat ze op canvas aanbrengt en beschildert, deels om de contrasten tussen licht en donker aan te scherpen (Travelling Light) of om een waterig kleurspoor te trekken. Zo zijn het hybride schilderijen geworden, herscheppingen van een onherbergzaam natuurlijk landschap die een getormenteerd innerlijk landschap weerspiegelen.
Marie Cloquet heeft, na het zoveelste bezoek, uiteindelijk Nouadhibou losgelaten. De scheepswrakken hadden haar op den duur een verstikkend gevoel bezorgd. En wellicht was het ook tot haar doorgedrongen dat ze haar type landschap ook elders kon aantreffen. Ze deed haar werk in Normandië, Iran of Japan, en kwam terug met foto’s van ruïneuze plaatsen en groezelige interieurs die ze verscheurde, aan een invretende lichtbehandeling onderwierp en hergroepeerde tot indringende beelden van verwering en verval. Als gegrepen door een barok gevoel voor drama – Remnants IV doet aan een Kruisafneming van Rubens denken – bracht ze almaar vaker witte doeken in plooien of gordijnen in rafels aan. Het zijn de enige sporen van een menselijke aanwezigheid die met geweld lijkt te zijn verdreven.
Jan Braet – Artroze – Knack 2019
In her work, Marie Cloquet likes to move from the center to the periphery, her eye is drawn to destruction, marginalization and the abject. Years ago, while traveling through the West African country of Mauritania, she became fascinated with Nouadhibou. In this coastal borderland town, Cloquet discovered ‘a world under the radar’, which had clearly been deprived of the benefits of globalization. Slavery, beached shipwrecks and other debris, traces of (neo) colonialism and refugees stranded after a failed crossing to Europe: Nouadhibou, no matter how unknown and far away, is a scale model of current world issues. How do people live (survive) here? Is there harmony in the chaos? How does man deal with places, events or objects that are eyesores that present themselves as virtually ineradicable?
Cloquet put together an extensive archive of photographs that she made in the coastal town, 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. Similar 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 collage-wise, 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; familiarity and alienation, attraction and repulsion come together in the viewing experience.
More than ever, it is the experiment that drives Cloquet’s work. 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, somehow reminiscent of tapestries, tend towards the realm of the suggestive. Through her production of photograms, in the spirit of Man Ray, Cloquet also explores for the first time the domain of camera-less photography. By placing and exposing objects directly on photosensitive material in the dark room, she creates highly aesthetic images of graceful contours, complemented with transparent forms. 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 beauty. Do we undergo these depicted obstacles in a different, more open manner? Can beauty and the repulsive exist simultaneously and feed each other?
Cloquet does not speak in symbols, but rather in images. Nevertheless, her visual motifs are imbued with an emotional charge, an indirect reaction to the impressions that reach her as an artist and a human being in the 21st century. A torn and grubby curtain, a makeshift, patched together, living hut: they depict a broken homeport, a destroyed shelter – something man has a dire need for in times of chaos. At the same time, Cloquet refers to motifs and genres from art history: the draperies in classical painting, for example, or the abstract forms of Constructivism. Broadly referencing photography, painting, (non-)architecture and sculpture, Cloquet’s works seem to transcend boundaries and, in their own way, make a bid for the notion of ‘total work of art ’. They are inclusive in the way they manage – if only for a moment – to elude extremes such as here and there, then and now, and I and the other.
Grete Simkuté
Born 10/03/1976
Lives and works in Gent, Belgium
Education 1994 -1998
LUCA School of Arts – Gent
Current exhibitions
‘The Collection’ – M Leuven – BE
Solo exhibitions
2024
‘Grotto’ – Salon Blanc – Oostende – BE
‘Belvédère’ – Zebrastraat – Gent – BE
2023
‘Cavemen’ – Annie Gentils Gallery – Antwerpen – BE
‘Perfect ratios’ – Front desk Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens – Deurle – curated by Laurens Otto
2022
‘Earth, wind, & fire’ – Solo presentation Art Brussels, Jason Haam Gallery
‘You want it darker – We kill the flame’ Corkstreet 9 London – Frieze / Jason Haam Gallery
2021
‘Remnants’ NO/Gallery Gent
2020
‘Halab’ Annie Gentils Gallery Antwerpen
2019
soloshow, Paris photo prismes, Grand Palais, Annie Gentils Gallery, Paris
‘Traveling Light’ Annie Gentils gallery, Antwerp
duoshow Marie Cloquet & Guy Rombouts, Arco Madrid, Annie Gentils gallery, Madrid
2018
Duoshow ‘Temporalizing temporality’ Marie Cloquet & Peter Buggenhout, Jason Haam Gallery, Seoul
2017
‘Obstacles’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
2016
‘ART ON PAPER’ Annie Gentils Gallery BOZAR, Brussel
2015
‘ONE’ Secondroom curated by Elke Andreas Boon, Gent
2014
‘The solo project’ with Annie Gentils gallery, Basel
2013
‘Nouadhibou’ Annie Gentils gallery, Antwerpen
‘YIA’ with Annie Gentils Gallery, Paris
2010
‘Picture this’ Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle
2009
‘High tide or low tide’ Argentaurum Gallery, Zoute
2002
‘photography on canvas’ Koraalberg Art Gallery, Antwerpen
Group exhibitions
2025
‘Pierre(s)’ – Galerie LRS52- Liège
2024
‘The Vessel’ with Kasper Bosmans, Nicolas Provost & Lenny Vervaeke – Ontsteking – Gent
‘Probabilidades, registros, Experimentos y técnica’ – Duo with Margot Kalach – Galeria Hilario Galguera – Madrid
‘Deaf Republic’ – Jason Haam Gallery – Seoul
‘Chestnut grenades & shooting sticks’ – Barbé Gallery – Gent
‘Give me an Answer’ – Curator – Marie Cloquet Studio – Gent
2023
‘Chosen’ – Stichting Liedts-Meesen – Gent
Jason Haam – Five years – with Mircea Suciu, Peter Buggenhout, Sarah Lucas, Urs Fisher, Jonathan Gardner, Charles Ritchie, Nick Goss – Seoul
Arte Laguna Prize – Laureate – Arsenale – Venice
2022
‘El cuarto Flamenco – Avalancha’, Galeria Hilario Galguera, Madrid
Willem Boel – Maxime Brigou – Marie Cloquet – Stijn Cole
‘Dark night of the soul’ – Jason Haam Gallery – Seoul
‘Nieuwe kunstcreaties’ – Vlaams Parlement – Brussel
2021
‘Openbare werken’ – Voo?uit – Gent
‘Het voorstel’ – Biënnale van ideeën – CC De steiger – Menen
‘Einderloos’ – De mijlpaal – Knokke
2020
Coup de ville 2020 – Chasing flowers – WARP - Sint-Niklaas
Are(n)a ‘Agree to disagree’ – curated by Nils Verkaeren – Kusseneers Gallery – Brussel
From the collection ‘Poetic faith’ – S.M.A.K. – Gent
2019
The road is clear – In de ruimte – Gent
Group show – Jason Haam Gallery- Seoul
2018
Biënnale van de schilderkunst – Over landschappen – Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle
‘Frame play pause’ Vierkante zaal, Sint-Niklaas
2017
‘Vloed’ Ten Bogaerde, Koksijde
‘Yugen #art, Gent
‘Bank Gallery Projects’ Vézelay
2016
‘Intergalactic dust’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
‘WEWANTOSEE’ Kanazawa
2015
‘Vanitas extended’ , Ieper
2014
‘Grenzen/loos’ Emergent Gallery, Veurne
2013
‘Seismology of the times’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
2012
‘4 de Korenbeurs, Schiedam
‘Waste’ Art consultancy Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem
2011
‘Jonge vlaamse meesters’ Hermitage, Amsterdam
2010
‘Homecoming party’ Casa Argentaurum, Gent
2008
‘Event of the unforeseen’ Laugavegur 66, Reykjavik
curated by Hulda Ros Gudnadottir
‘Rewind’ vierkante zaal, Sint-Niklaas
Curated by Filip Van De Velde
2007
‘Creative space’ curated by “Chantier”, Gent
‘what’s the question’ curated by “Chantier”, Gent
2006
‘Labo#2’ vzw existentie, Gent
‘Labo#1’ vzw existentie, Gent
2003
‘Het kunstsalon van Gent’ St-Pietersabdij, Gent
(selected by: Lieve foncke, Jan hoet, Hans Martens, Edith Doove.)
2001
‘Young artists (selected by)’ Witte zaal, St-Lucas, Gent
selected by: Lex Ter Braak, Amsterdam
2000
‘Young artists (selected by)’ Witte zaal, Gent
selected by: Jan Hoet, Gent
To some extent, Marie Cloquet’s practice follows Gerhard Richter’s famous conception of painting after photography, obtained by the German artist through the imperative not to use the latter ‘as a means to painting, but to use painting as a means to photography.’ Marie Cloquet not only paints over photographic prints, she also paints with photographic fragments by tearing up photographic prints into patches and welding them together on a material support in a way that amounts to an image situated on the verge between collage and décollage. However, Cloquet’s art practice stays away from the confrontational method of collage artists who juxtapose elements anchored in different contexts, as well as from the advertisement billboard aesthetics of décollage artists, to explore and reiterate the inconsistency of a single image, a single sight. Cloquet’s recent work pushes forward and develops the inner logic of her practice as a constant exchange between photography, painting, and (dé)collage. In the last four years, this exchange has abandoned the confinements of a mere pictorial production, and expanded into real space. Cloquet’s recent works are no longer bound by a frame, nor are they necessarily mounted onto the wall. Instead, they function as a free-standing sculptural screen (or panel) that addresses the viewer, relying on and responding to the architectural givens of the physical exhibition space. This is clearly exemplified by the current version of the work Squared Circle (2024), originally conceived in 2020 as a cylindrical, 360-degrees panorama of a volcanic landscape enveloped by a closed cube whose four visible facets were covered by images of derelict urban environments. Each of the facets was perforated with a round hole through which one could observe a segment of the volcanic landscape.
The 2020 version of Squared Circle was moving the viewer back and forth in a sort of zoom-in/zoom-out between the near urban environment, in itself publicly overlooked and therefore somehow remote, and the remote volcanic landscape, in itself hidden and inaccessible yet never fully suppressed and insistently resurfacing. Squared Circle (2020) functioned as a mechanism of interconnectedness reminiscent of contemporary communication systems governing our world, and as a manifestation of distance and sharp borders. At the same time the work exposed how behind every image (or space) lies another, seemingly unconnected latent image (or space) awaiting to appear. The work’s current version opens up the enclosed squared circle, and reemerges as a curved screen unfolding panels of the urban environments and the volcanic landscape in an intertwined, semi-cinematic sequence running through two of the exhibition spaces of Zebrastraat. Cloquet’s Squared Circle features some of the main aspects of her practice, above all, the fact that she deals with natural landscapes and man-made environments on the same level, demonstrating how they both belong to one (interrupted) continuum.
The distinction between nature and culture, or rather, between the natural state and the cultural/civilised state, was obviously created by culture. While occupied with the artificial conditions of social life, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) were speculating on a pre-social life while perceiving a hypothetical abstraction about human nature prior to the cultural state of civilisation. This led to a fundamental split in early modern philosophy of nature vs culture, of a natural, untouched, harmonious world presumably preceding the artificial, constructed, relational world of society.
By entwining urban environment and volcanic landscape, Cloquet’s work deconstructs this dichotomy of nature vs culture, elucidating how our notion of nature was born out of culture, how our idea of uncorrupted nature was retroactively invented by culture, it also establishes an opposite perspective subjecting culture to nature, namely, to erosion, disintegration, dissolution, and eventually, disappearance. Cloquet’s practice ridicules culture’s pretension to permanence, persistence, and immortality. In this sense, her work can be regarded in affinity to the field of studies known as the Anthropocene. Literally, the term “Anthropocene” means the “age of man”. It refers to the imprint of human kind on nature, distinguishing the age of man from previous geological epochs. The Anthropocene points to a profound transformation in our ecosystem, in light of which human life is part of an experiment conducted on planet earth and its inhabitants. The thought of the Anthropocene undermines the distinction between the human and the natural. It no longer considers water, land, and air as the transparent backgrounds of all human activities, but as operative factors, in relation to which world history cannot be exclusively described as a battle between ideologies and social forms. The Anthropocene examines human culture and political life from the point of view of nature.
Cloquet’s work renders nature and culture indistinguishable from one another through the concept of “the ruin”. The ruin allows her to incorporate a derelict human environment into the law of nature, according to which everything is ephemeral and temporary. In Cloquet’s work, the ruin is both content and practice. The works not only depict ruins, they are topographies of a ruin, an enactment thereof. A correspondence of form and content, they stem from discarded sights, but they are also made as an act of ruining, patching together torn fragments of discarded sights marked by the wreckage of history and human damage, or by natural disastrous phenomena. When applied with liquid paint, and layered with areas of chromatic intensity, Cloquet’s cracked topographies of ruin undergo revivification, springing out. More than a means of smoothening the cracks, Cloquet’s recent works utilise colour as a means of adapting to the cracks, living with and from them. The colours applied to the surface recall the biblical story of Moses hitting a rock, which then produced water for the Israelites suffering famine. The coloured areas turn the rocky topography into a wellspring.
By working through and with the materiality and visibility of the ruin, Cloquet’s practice suggests an ethical stance, defying the underlying concept of human history as a linear progress in time. Cloquet’s work avoids the false image of overcoming and reconciliation. It conducts a process of accumulating fragments and broken pieces into a multi-temporal topography where the ruins of the past continue to prevail in the present. It offers a mode of remembrance and recollection. In contrast to the aestheticised ruin of Albert Speer (1905-1981) who designed buildings as glorious future ruins, Cloquet’s ethical approach to ruins reflects humility, taking into account the frailty and fragility of life and culture. It locates the topography of ruins as the consequences of pursuing growth, and as a way to oppose this pursuit while lingering on the catastrophe of history, while pointing to the catastrophe to come. Her work could be considered an expression of silent urgency with regard to the instability and turbulence all of us face nowadays. Rather than positioning itself as an external representation thereof, Cloquet’s work is determined by the logic of the world as a persistent, continuous ruin. For Cloquet, the topography of the ruin enables her work to circulate through different times, at once looking forwards and backwards, bringing together different places, superimposing the near and the remote, defining each in terms of the other.
Ory Dessau 2024
The Search for the New Land
Preliminary Notes on Marie Cloquet’s Work
The more I reflect on Marie Cloquet’s work, the more it appears to me as a peculiar form of Land Art. In her work, Cloquet creates new landscapes by altering and modifying real landscapes. She intervenes in the landscape, rearranging it, rendering it indistinguishable from the images within which it is generated, the papers on which these images are printed, etc.
Cloquet’s images are not representations of landscapes that exist outside the images. They are collage driven hybrid landscapes, both actual and illusionistic, made of, in, and by fragments and patches of real landscapes. They turn segmented elements of landscapes into pictorial elements, and the other way around. In this sense, one should refer to Cloquet’s work as a physical act of photographic dislocation, transposition, reconstruction.
The Image of Cloquet’s work cannot be defined as an outcome of optical recording or purely visual organization. It stems from a material friction shifting the artist’s body between a variety of textures, phases of matter, and topographies. It is a tactile, haptic, corporeal entity, an inconsistent hybrid landscape whose textural, chemical, and topographical shifts expose the viewer’s field of vision to the cracks therein. Due to the different landscapes it welds together, the Image of Cloquet’s work engenders ruptures and rifts along the stitching lines between them. It deconstructs the notion of the Image and our perception of the world as a persistent, regulated picture.
Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes are more than a constant exchange between physical intervention and photographic dislocation. They also function as a material support, as the ground surface of watercolor paintings. When absorbed in transparent layers of watercolors, Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes undergo an additional transformation, becoming a screened image, a process of appearance emerging through a transparent partition, and at the same time, a hazy sight behind layers of watercolors. The transparent screen of watercolors smoothens the cracks between the different photographic landscape patches, consolidating them into an image of evocation. It assumes their appearance through the transparent screen of the watercolors as a result of recollection. However, it also pushes the landscapes backwards, keeping them behind the transparent screen as an indication of a failed recollection, as an elusive vision. Paradoxically, the painterly transparent screen of Cloquet’s hybrid landscapes does not operate as a fictional artificial factor but opens them up to a horizon of memory. It situates them in affinity to the category of the archive, yet, concurrently, it incorporates this category into procedures of obscurity, of screening, of loss.
The painterly element of Cloquet’s work marks her strive for color against the black & white background of her landscapes. The rare and short trails of colors hovering above her colorless photographic topographies throw us back to the days following the invention of (black & white) photography, and of hand-painted photographs as a means of reviving images. They recall Jean-Luc Godard’s statement that photography and cinema were born as a melancholic expression of mourning, that initially their black & white imagery was a demonstration of loss.
Cloquet’s 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
Travelling Light van Marie Cloquet in galerie Annie Gentils, Antwerpen.
Ze was in 2005 met de auto naar de westkust van Afrika gereisd en tot aan de baai van Nouadhibou geraakt, de op één na grootste stad van Mauretanië. Hier in de buurt zwalpten in 1816 op hun vlot de overlevenden van het gezonken fregat dat Théodore Géricault inspireerde tot zijn beroemde schilderij Le radeau de la Méduse.
Wellicht ontsnapten de slavernij, het racisme, het radicale islamisme en de barakken van gestrande vluchtelingen in Nouadhibou niet helemaal aan de aandacht van Marie Cloquet (43), maar het beeld van het reusachtige scheepskerkhof dat zich voor haar ogen uitstrekte: dat was de overweldigende ervaring die haar het jaar daarop deed terugkeren – en later nog enkele malen. Begiftigd met de gevoeligheid van een kunstenaar deden de schots en scheef uit de zee stekende of op het strand gestapelde wrakken, de ruwe rotsen en de door striemende winden overal indringende zandkorrels bij haar de behoefte ontstaan om te tekenen.
Zo zou ook pakweg William Turner (1775‐1851) te werk zijn gegaan, gedreven door de drang om de schoonheid van ongerepte landschappen eerst vluchtig te schetsen, om er zich na de reis in het atelier door te laten inspireren tot lichtende schilderijen die de idee van het sublieme oproepen. Marie Cloquet trof de kust in Nouadhibou allesbehalve ongerept aan. Menselijk en materieel een gigantische puinhoop, maar beeldend net zo sterk als Turners besneeuwde bergtoppen en azuurblauwe meren in de Alpen. Na de reis, in het atelier, raapte zij haar schetsen van het verhakkelde landschap bijeen, filterde ze uit en liet ze transcenderen tot schilderijen van een lelijkheid zo adembenemend dat ze de schoonheid bijna naar de kroon steekt. Dat komt eerst en vooral omdat Cloquet, net als Turner, eigenlijk het licht al het werk laat doen. Er is licht in de hemel, maar ook in de hel. Het volstaat om het op de juiste manier te laten indringen, tot de dingen hun zwaarte verliezen en opgaan in een illusie. Overtuig uzelf ervan op de expo ‘Traveling light’.
Ze schetst noch schildert op de gewone manier. Schetsen betekent voor haar fotograferen in zwart‐wit. In de donkere kamer worden de beelden heel groot op de muur geprojecteerd, zodat ze een korrelig aanschijn krijgen. Ze kiest er bepaalde zones uit en overplakt ze met papier, ingestreken met een fotografische emulsie, een lichtgevoelige laag. Die stukken worden gescheurd, belicht en ontwikkeld in verschillende baden. Dan komt de fase die Cloquet schilderen noemt: met de gekozen fragmenten stelt ze een monumentaal beeld samen dat ze op canvas aanbrengt en beschildert, deels om de contrasten tussen licht en donker aan te scherpen (Travelling Light) of om een waterig kleurspoor te trekken. Zo zijn het hybride schilderijen geworden, herscheppingen van een onherbergzaam natuurlijk landschap die een getormenteerd innerlijk landschap weerspiegelen.
Marie Cloquet heeft, na het zoveelste bezoek, uiteindelijk Nouadhibou losgelaten. De scheepswrakken hadden haar op den duur een verstikkend gevoel bezorgd. En wellicht was het ook tot haar doorgedrongen dat ze haar type landschap ook elders kon aantreffen. Ze deed haar werk in Normandië, Iran of Japan, en kwam terug met foto’s van ruïneuze plaatsen en groezelige interieurs die ze verscheurde, aan een invretende lichtbehandeling onderwierp en hergroepeerde tot indringende beelden van verwering en verval. Als gegrepen door een barok gevoel voor drama – Remnants IV doet aan een Kruisafneming van Rubens denken – bracht ze almaar vaker witte doeken in plooien of gordijnen in rafels aan. Het zijn de enige sporen van een menselijke aanwezigheid die met geweld lijkt te zijn verdreven.
Jan Braet – Artroze – Knack 2019
In her work, Marie Cloquet likes to move from the center to the periphery, her eye is drawn to destruction, marginalization and the abject. Years ago, while traveling through the West African country of Mauritania, she became fascinated with Nouadhibou. In this coastal borderland town, Cloquet discovered ‘a world under the radar’, which had clearly been deprived of the benefits of globalization. Slavery, beached shipwrecks and other debris, traces of (neo) colonialism and refugees stranded after a failed crossing to Europe: Nouadhibou, no matter how unknown and far away, is a scale model of current world issues. How do people live (survive) here? Is there harmony in the chaos? How does man deal with places, events or objects that are eyesores that present themselves as virtually ineradicable?
Cloquet put together an extensive archive of photographs that she made in the coastal town, 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. Similar 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 collage-wise, 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; familiarity and alienation, attraction and repulsion come together in the viewing experience.
More than ever, it is the experiment that drives Cloquet’s work. 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, somehow reminiscent of tapestries, tend towards the realm of the suggestive. Through her production of photograms, in the spirit of Man Ray, Cloquet also explores for the first time the domain of camera-less photography. By placing and exposing objects directly on photosensitive material in the dark room, she creates highly aesthetic images of graceful contours, complemented with transparent forms. 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 beauty. Do we undergo these depicted obstacles in a different, more open manner? Can beauty and the repulsive exist simultaneously and feed each other?
Cloquet does not speak in symbols, but rather in images. Nevertheless, her visual motifs are imbued with an emotional charge, an indirect reaction to the impressions that reach her as an artist and a human being in the 21st century. A torn and grubby curtain, a makeshift, patched together, living hut: they depict a broken homeport, a destroyed shelter – something man has a dire need for in times of chaos. At the same time, Cloquet refers to motifs and genres from art history: the draperies in classical painting, for example, or the abstract forms of Constructivism. Broadly referencing photography, painting, (non-)architecture and sculpture, Cloquet’s works seem to transcend boundaries and, in their own way, make a bid for the notion of ‘total work of art ’. They are inclusive in the way they manage – if only for a moment – to elude extremes such as here and there, then and now, and I and the other.
Grete Simkuté
Born 10/03/1976
Lives and works in Gent, Belgium
Education 1994 -1998
LUCA School of Arts – Gent
Current exhibitions
‘The Collection’ – M Leuven – BE
Solo exhibitions
2024
‘Grotto’ – Salon Blanc – Oostende – BE
‘Belvédère’ – Zebrastraat – Gent – BE
2023
‘Cavemen’ – Annie Gentils Gallery – Antwerpen – BE
‘Perfect ratios’ – Front desk Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens – Deurle – curated by Laurens Otto
2022
‘Earth, wind, & fire’ – Solo presentation Art Brussels, Jason Haam Gallery
‘You want it darker – We kill the flame’ Corkstreet 9 London – Frieze / Jason Haam Gallery
2021
‘Remnants’ NO/Gallery Gent
2020
‘Halab’ Annie Gentils Gallery Antwerpen
2019
soloshow, Paris photo prismes, Grand Palais, Annie Gentils Gallery, Paris
‘Traveling Light’ Annie Gentils gallery, Antwerp
duoshow Marie Cloquet & Guy Rombouts, Arco Madrid, Annie Gentils gallery, Madrid
2018
Duoshow ‘Temporalizing temporality’ Marie Cloquet & Peter Buggenhout, Jason Haam Gallery, Seoul
2017
‘Obstacles’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
2016
‘ART ON PAPER’ Annie Gentils Gallery BOZAR, Brussel
2015
‘ONE’ Secondroom curated by Elke Andreas Boon, Gent
2014
‘The solo project’ with Annie Gentils gallery, Basel
2013
‘Nouadhibou’ Annie Gentils gallery, Antwerpen
‘YIA’ with Annie Gentils Gallery, Paris
2010
‘Picture this’ Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle
2009
‘High tide or low tide’ Argentaurum Gallery, Zoute
2002
‘photography on canvas’ Koraalberg Art Gallery, Antwerpen
Group exhibitions
2025
‘Pierre(s)’ – Galerie LRS52- Liège
2024
‘The Vessel’ with Kasper Bosmans, Nicolas Provost & Lenny Vervaeke – Ontsteking – Gent
‘Probabilidades, registros, Experimentos y técnica’ – Duo with Margot Kalach – Galeria Hilario Galguera – Madrid
‘Deaf Republic’ – Jason Haam Gallery – Seoul
‘Chestnut grenades & shooting sticks’ – Barbé Gallery – Gent
‘Give me an Answer’ – Curator – Marie Cloquet Studio – Gent
2023
‘Chosen’ – Stichting Liedts-Meesen – Gent
Jason Haam – Five years – with Mircea Suciu, Peter Buggenhout, Sarah Lucas, Urs Fisher, Jonathan Gardner, Charles Ritchie, Nick Goss – Seoul
Arte Laguna Prize – Laureate – Arsenale – Venice
2022
‘El cuarto Flamenco – Avalancha’, Galeria Hilario Galguera, Madrid
Willem Boel – Maxime Brigou – Marie Cloquet – Stijn Cole
‘Dark night of the soul’ – Jason Haam Gallery – Seoul
‘Nieuwe kunstcreaties’ – Vlaams Parlement – Brussel
2021
‘Openbare werken’ – Voo?uit – Gent
‘Het voorstel’ – Biënnale van ideeën – CC De steiger – Menen
‘Einderloos’ – De mijlpaal – Knokke
2020
Coup de ville 2020 – Chasing flowers – WARP - Sint-Niklaas
Are(n)a ‘Agree to disagree’ – curated by Nils Verkaeren – Kusseneers Gallery – Brussel
From the collection ‘Poetic faith’ – S.M.A.K. – Gent
2019
The road is clear – In de ruimte – Gent
Group show – Jason Haam Gallery- Seoul
2018
Biënnale van de schilderkunst – Over landschappen – Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle
‘Frame play pause’ Vierkante zaal, Sint-Niklaas
2017
‘Vloed’ Ten Bogaerde, Koksijde
‘Yugen #art, Gent
‘Bank Gallery Projects’ Vézelay
2016
‘Intergalactic dust’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
‘WEWANTOSEE’ Kanazawa
2015
‘Vanitas extended’ , Ieper
2014
‘Grenzen/loos’ Emergent Gallery, Veurne
2013
‘Seismology of the times’ Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen
2012
‘4 de Korenbeurs, Schiedam
‘Waste’ Art consultancy Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem
2011
‘Jonge vlaamse meesters’ Hermitage, Amsterdam
2010
‘Homecoming party’ Casa Argentaurum, Gent
2008
‘Event of the unforeseen’ Laugavegur 66, Reykjavik
curated by Hulda Ros Gudnadottir
‘Rewind’ vierkante zaal, Sint-Niklaas
Curated by Filip Van De Velde
2007
‘Creative space’ curated by “Chantier”, Gent
‘what’s the question’ curated by “Chantier”, Gent
2006
‘Labo#2’ vzw existentie, Gent
‘Labo#1’ vzw existentie, Gent
2003
‘Het kunstsalon van Gent’ St-Pietersabdij, Gent
(selected by: Lieve foncke, Jan hoet, Hans Martens, Edith Doove.)
2001
‘Young artists (selected by)’ Witte zaal, St-Lucas, Gent
selected by: Lex Ter Braak, Amsterdam
2000
‘Young artists (selected by)’ Witte zaal, Gent
selected by: Jan Hoet, Gent