Marie Lannoo
"Marie Lannoo" by Marie Leduc, Fall 2008, pp. 154-56
Goethe believed that colour is a meeting of darkness and light, a joining of opposites that together form our visual and emotional experience of colour. The mysteries of colour and light became henceforth the obsession of 19th-century artists and an inspiration for almost every modern movement in painting.
Colour and its relation to light has been the subject of intense research for Marie Lannoo ever since she turned to a minimalist, abstract mode of painting eight years ago. Her earliest works in this genre were directed towards discovering the properties of her materials—acrylic paint and glazes—and how their translucent qualities affect the depth and dimensionality of colour. The square, unframed and flat, became her favoured surface shape. In painting series such as See Nothing, See Everything, Lannoo pushed this shape into a sculptural mode, turning squares and rectangles into cubes and other shapes that projected off the wall. Even in this work, the surface remained supreme, both as a reflective skin and as a space of infinite depth.
In this exhibition, “Thin Places,” Lannoo has returned to flat, borderless squares, but this time she emphasizes the planar nature of the surface by bevelling the edges of each painting so that the sides of her shallow box frames disappear altogether. Now the picture plane is just that, a sliver that hovers away from the wall with a surface that has as much depth as a pool of water, a liquid depth in which colours unfold and quiver. In Thin Places #8, horizontal waves of blue and green undulate just beneath the surface.
The pulse of these works—their inherent internal movement—is the work of colour. As light strikes adjacent colours, their hues shift. Blue against pink glows mauve and, against green, blue is intensified. Complementary colours, such as red and green, resist blending and, as Thin Places #1 demonstrates, light only excites the colour further. In Thin Places #9, a cerulean blue stroke cuts vertically through the centre of the square against a background of wavy pink. In Thin Places #1, a translucent border of green is adjacent to areas of blue that lead into a red centre that reverberates intensely.
Lannoo tells us in her artist statement that thin places—she borrowed the idea from the writer Alice Munro—are “places where two worlds meet and time stands still.” In Goethe’s estimation, darkness denies us colour but light brings it forth; colour is that thin place in between.
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