MARIE-LOU IN ACTION
“Recta manus”. The hand of the artist. “Dexterous hand”: this two-word quote from the epitaph
written by Angelo Poliziano in 1490 for the cenotaph of Giotto in Florence Duomo, has made a
lasting impression in the history of art. During the Italian Mannerism period, it was used to
designate the individual style of an artist. The creative ability was in those times synonymous with
the craftsmanship of the creator, with its manual abilities.
Since then, this notion has freed itself from the dominance of the formal and material artistic canon,
and from its previous association with manual ability. As a result of this emancipation process,
“recta manus” can now be seen as the “trace of artistic activity”, through which the thoughts of the
performer come to existence. Today the artist is no longer only a craftsman, and accordingly, the
material workmanship involved in creation is now more of an addition to the inner concept of the
work of art, and no longer the entire work of art.
An illustration of this change of meaning can be seen in abstract expressionism, including in its
purest form: action painting. “Gesture-painting” in fact brings to mind Chinese and Japanese
calligraphy, where the main point is the manual activity of the writer. This similarity is particularly
significant in the works of artists such as Wols, Karl Otto Götz or Hans Hartung. But the most
famous experimenter of all has to be Jackson Pollock: his painting was a theater. Through his
works, the act of painting itself became a work of art. Painting in action is a performance.
Considering the above, one may question the border between the performance and the painting, or
even if this border really exists. What defines “Action Painting”? What builds its being? The
evolution previously narrated suggests an answer to this question. The activity of the artist with his
own hands is central in traditional painting. In fact, “painting” in its traditional sense refers only to
the material result of artistic activity, but in fact the painting process is without bounds, it is infinite.
The gesture of the artist must therefore be seen as having a ”social significance“. Gestures can in
fact be considered as nonverbal communication. From the perspective of artistic tradition, iconic
gestures are even more important, as they reflect the reality in its many forms, for example when
they are portraying a concrete activity, allegorizing the outlines of objects or rearranging objects in
space. Thus gestures do not only refer to concrete things, but must be seen, from a metaphorical
perspective, as an alternate form of speech. As for the artistic activity itself, it should in turn be
seen as symbolizing action.
It is thus possible to interpret abstract expressionism, as a evocation of this symbolism through the
movement of the artist’s hand. We have a good example of this phenomenon with Nicolas de Staël,
who tried to blend abstraction with reality in many of his works.
Those experiments have found their full expression and most obvious development in neoexpressionism, where the experience of the artistic gesture is connected with new forms of
figuration. For example in the oeuvre of Basquiat one can find the modern- symbol repertoire of
the colored metropolis, where graffiti signs, child drawings, comic figures, obscene wall-scribble,
pictograms, advertisements, slogans, details of city maps , African masks and totem figures are
mixed together. In fact, Basquiat can be seen as a precursor of “Bad Painting”. Marcia Tucker,
curator of the 1978 exhibition of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, coined the term, and used
it
to
designate
works
of
such
artists
as
HYPERLINK
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wegman_%28photographer%29" \o "William Wegman
(photographer)"William Wegman, HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Brown" \o
"Joan
Brown"Joan
Brown,
HYPERLINK
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Copley_%28artist%29" \o "William Copley (artist)"William
N. Copley (CPLY) and HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Jenney" \o "Neil
Jenney"Neil Jenney.As time progressed, “Bad Painting” became increasingly popular in Europe.
For example we can recall the 2007 exhibition of the Vienna Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK)
entitled : “Bad Painting – Good Art”. The art presented in this exhibit, including works by artists
such as Georg Baselitz and Asger Jorn, was characterized by formal freedom and specific, naiveprimitive figuration (Arte Povera).
As the next step in the spectrum of this evolution, we can find the art of Marie-Lou. Her work
exemplifies both Action-Painting and Bad-Painting, with “recta manus” playing the central role.
Her works also incorporate elements from all the artists mentioned above, as a flowing continuity of
this creative movement. The binding of part-painted, part-costumed figures with the canvas, which
is already present in her earlier creations, is more fully developed in the series “Painting-Surgeries”.
Indeed, in the most recent pieces, the figures are changed radically by the use of paint itself, and
their identities and backgrounds are rearranged and renewed in an artistic way. When seeing
Marie-Lou’s entire oeuvre from the perspective of this historical progression, the art-historical
genesis emerges clearly. The painted figure takes the role of the canvas and transforms itself,,
through the action-painting process and the hand of the artist, in a “Bad-Painting”.