MARYSE PIQUE
Contemporary Abstract Painter
FIXED-GAZES SERIES
Fixed-Gazes had led me to reconstruct the memory of the myths pushed by a reflection : They are not artist concepts but just a representation of impossible art, the thread between image and object, painting and thought, can never be removed, given distancing is a prerequisite of representation. Furthermore and following all these deductions, the real challenge of my personal version was supposed to introduce me through a process of fossilization in the eye of the myth, to discover her gaze, and also the separation between performer and viewer, painting and thought, image and object who can never be removed, without the destruction of performance.
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The idea that the object, the presence of Greek mythology in my paintings was this centrifugal force to identify the subject, as well as a presence that was coming out. I really wanted that in my paintings. It was about bringing that duality into the painting, from a landscape base. I think the painting is done when I feel a reconnection to the basic idea I originally had. They never look like what I expected them to be, but there is something about them. Fixed-gazes series are made through an additive process- I don't do a lot of wiping off. I cover up instead, so there are many layers to the final result. Oftentimes I'll start from a kind of reflection on another canvas- maybe it has three kinds of blue in certain proportions, for instance, but at the end the result may not have blue in it all. I'm there mixing paint for a painting, so I'm making decisions about what it's going to be.
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Pique's Fixed-Gazes Series tend to gravitate between two poles: alternating between gesture and reflection, they may be earthly or ethereal, intensely physical or quietly spiritual. The Artist seems to revel in the act of painting; in the materiality of oil and acrylic paint roughly applied by brush, palette knife, or serrated trowel; in the texture of densely built-up and scrapped-down surfaces; in the agile, sweeping gesture. She has used tools and techniques to create works that express a broad range of emotions, from explosive anger and profound mourning to, more recently, joyful exuberance. Her latest works seems to pulsate with life. The paintings in this new body of work are densely layered, perhaps in reponse to Pique's reconsideratíon of her own life and work as being a group of experiences, one piled on top of another... The most thickly layered works in this new series Fixed-Gazes, are Phaedra, Persephone and Prometheus who evoke the double feeling of pity and horror through three shadows, three silhouettes and three colors, slipping on a canvas, that becomes a mythological background with the implied presence of gods. Simplifying: Used color to create what she defined as "perceptions" or three-dimensional forms on a flat surface resulting from the thick-app of paint.
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