marion charlet

marioncharlet@yahoo.fr

www.marioncharlet.com

Places between nature and artifice are determined by Marion Charlet’s paintings.

The evocation of a field or a landscape full of shrubs is confronted to colorful geometric shapes, for which the structure is putting in perspective the space in front of us. The plant elements seem corrupt or contaminate these figures, which are developing like domestic or residential forms. The viewer sees traces of tiles, the perimeter of a pond, and even a chair that seems to be the most convincing evidence of human presence, perhaps fled, but still present thanks to few clues.

We think about these futuristic novels in which ghost cities are regained by vegetation and showing a trace of a vanished humanity. The visual seduction coming from these paintings is tempered by the discomfort created by this absence, malaise that is amplified by colors often strange, sour, as if an impairment of our world had occurred.

Even the great luminous landscape (Awake 2008) intrigues us with its too green grass and flowers full of life, as if he had been the place of a disaster just as the example of the pictures of a lush nature taken around the Tchernobyl site.
Another painting (Bascule 2008) also puts the viewer in the unstable position of being out of balance, like a film shot through a subjective camera, this imbalance added to the strangeness felt during the contemplation of the landscape, which is extending itself so faraway that we can not reach it: the bridge that connected it to us has been ruptured.

The approach of Marion Charlet is not allegorical, but her work shows the crack that came of the certainties that we have regarding the world just as a representation.
She joins many young artists who, through different ways, are wondering about the bonds of our globalized world with an environment that once was identified with the enchanted domain of gods and nymphs. These relationships are now placed under the sign of worry, disillusionment and a form of interrogation on the authentic and the artificial.

Regardless their registry, between figure and specific form, her paintings give the image of this discomfort in representation. Their beauty is often insidious, such as the nature around Tchernobyl site, but that beauty has to be what needs to be preserved when all is lost. Bernard-Marie Koltes said: «Without beauty, life would not be worth living. So preserve this beauty, let this beauty, even if it sometimes happens not to be moral. But I think there is no di moral than beauty.»

Marc Desgrandchamps, MAy 2010