Marie Lannoo
"Marie Lannoo" by Marie Leduc, Winter 2006, pp. 86-87
The austerity and asceticism of Marie Lannoo’s installation is well described by its title—“See Nothing, See Everything.” Seventeen narrow, coloured boxes create a broken horizontal line that circles the interior walls at eye level. With this minimal expression, Lannoo transforms the Kenderdine’s small, irregular space into a singular moment “filled with the murmur of words.” In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault used this phrase to describe the reflexive nature of language. In Lannoo’s work, we find multiple reflections on the narratives that define our visual experience.
Entering the exhibition is an encounter with the horizon, that changing line that has been mythologized and systematized in art throughout the ages. We draw close to this line, only to discover that it is made of boxes. A mirror-like surface covers the face of each box and, under numerous layers of acrylic glaze, vertical veils of rich colour ripple and pulsate. The wall above is lit with the reflected colours of the rainbow. The boxes form a rhythm through the flow of colours within, above and on the ends of each one. The spatial pacing, from box to box and colour to colour, has the nuances of a musical composition, with differing harmonies and moments of rest.
As in her previous exhibits, Lannoo challenges the modes of visual language. Spatial depth is suggested not only through her deep layers of colour and reflective surfaces, but in how she has captured the horizon, with all its infinite depth, in such a solid, sculptural form. She draws us in and then abruptly makes us aware of the contradictions of what she has done.
Light and its relation to colour are also frankly expressed in the prismatic colours that appear to emanate from the boxes, the result of coloured segments hidden above eye level on top of the boxes. As with a sunset, when the light is out, the colours disappear.
Lannoo has embraced both sculpture and painting, allowing them to exist together. The precisely constructed boxes are a staccato of coloured objects that, at the same time, are surfaces that present an illusive, deceptive depth—something like Foucault’s “untroubled mirror in whose depths things gazed at themselves and reflected their own images back to one another.”
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