Essay Marie Le Lievre. Catalogue 2012. Andrew P Wood

'Marie Le Lievre', Catalogue for Paris and Sydney exhibitions,
(ISBN 978-0-473-22271-0), Andrew Paul Wood, 2012
New Zealand artist Marie Le Lievre understands the material of paint. Her canvasses seethe with bleeding and agitated skins of translucent and opaque tints on a mat finished ground. She is an empathetic and instinctive colourist. From behind protective blankets of dark, rich, subtle colour, little rainbows of pure colour emerge to flicker like flames at the periphery. The scale of the paintings ranges from domestic and intimate, to the heroic. In the latter especially, the effect is oceanic, and sublime in the Romantic sense – the viewer enters the painting. The eye is attracted to all the little complexities and puncta of interest: the complex patterns of textural rippling, the emergent islands of opacity, and the almost Rothko-like ambiguous fades. There is, perhaps, a closer relationship with the lyrical abstraction of European Tachisme than the action bravura of American Abstract Expressionism.

Firmly anchoring this experimentation is a carefully formulated compositional sensibility. A central, biomorphic-organic self-contained visual mass, a sort of mandala often incorporating a galaxy of complex and allusive interplay between colour and texture, forms the basis of each painting. These are not exclusively abstract. With the complex construction of each mass addition of drawn elements, a playful figuration is implied in the naive-primitivist traditions of Art Brut and KoBrA.

Colour is increasingly strident in its own right as a compositional device, highlighting Le Lievre’s dedicated working and reworking the luscious painted surface into something, though flat, is almost sculptural with intensity. Alternatively it can be a more simple dark cosmic egg, a black hole from which Stephen Hawking assures us only damaged information can escape. When Le Lievre chooses to work up the ground of her paintings, the Shiva-like dance of figure and plane is almost palpable in a glorious retinal richness.

Although primarily interested in colour and form, Le Lievre chooses not to abandon the figure entirely, but anchors figure and ground with specific motifs. Prominent among these symbolic forms is the handbag devolved to a basic oblong and the suggestion of an arching handle. While on one level this can be read as a feminist response to the idea of abstract painting as masculine, it also carries much of the significance of Anna Karenina’s red handbag in Tolstoy’s novel – a container of worldly desires and an anchor to consumer society.

Another reoccurring motif is a sort of crude biomorphic phallus. Again this can be read as a feminist statement, a symbolic castration of painting’s patriarchy, but it can also symbolise the procreative nature of painting. Another recent intervention is the inclusion of hidden text, either as gestural calligraphic mark in the paint, or as bristling drawn cilia and hairs, emphasising the organic nature of Le Lievre’s forms. We are encouraged to see them as living amorphous, amoebic entities with their own distinct personalities.

The paint is poured, layered, worked by hand, and tempered. The intended effect is that which Baldassare Castiglione in his Il Cortegiano (1528) termed Sprezzatura: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” – although the artist clearly wants us to see this defensive irony as the distancing mechanism of an unreliable narrator. There are sufficient signposts to suggest the effort and toil behind the implied randomness. This means that the work has many connotations, tension between reality and abstraction, chaos and control and ultimately defies final analysis.