Cécile MARCHAND's posturing

Cécile MARCHAND's has been painting for 17 years now and has been creating an unusual work without ever giving up her yearning for painting. Now she is working on a colléction of dreaming and languid hippos :hippo-Klein, hippo-Koon, hippo-Ingres.These hippos humourously extol the body and its poses.Buce more Cécile MARCHAND faces the margins, the clichés, the deely-rooted iconwgraphy which blur our visual approach.She stives to accept the vagaries of the picture without feeding on it, without repeating houself, without showing ony bittermoss.She plays upon it but dos not give up asserting her talent. Such freedom and humour make Cécile MARCHAND a genuine pop artist.Her painting is fraught with animals,postures in a truly pictoriale paganism.As a strongwilled and ambitious painter she addresses art painting and its demands in an assetive way. Her work reveals itself beyond manuerism and verbosity. One of Cécile MARCHAND's goals may lie in her willingnesse to retrieve some of Giotto's blue tinges so rich with regal humility,abstract reverberations,be they visual or mystical.
Yet you cannot consider it as a strictly religious painting.Her work should be seen as an art of posture, some sort of a truth reflecting the soul and the body, as a certain way of dealing with the light and accident of an ingrained and outmolded iconography. Her postures must also be grasped as an ethics of painting, an ethics of pictorial gesture.
There are neither simulated ectasy in the representation of the Madonna nor poste- modern exaltation.You can find humour but no metapictorial irony.You will not find fake lyricism, paintless flamboyant perspective or presumptions attitude.
Cécile MARCHAND contents herself with keeping her exacting postures high, untangling the skein of prevailing clichés with the help of an uncommon vision.You do have Madonna who are not treated like symbols or allegories but rather like lithe characters. You can tell from their twisted bodies some sort of incarnation which is both vivid and strangely remote.
They seem to impose themselves in a complex space, between the figurative subject and the abstract background.

Then there are the changing light, the abstracte and sensual interlace.The ethics of painting which has already been dealt with may also be found in the treatment of light and colour part of support taken into account in the processe of the making-the reflection vary, the light assumes various hues, the texture is never approched abstractly. The visual aspect previols.
"The anorbytical tool" is efficient and involves the spectateur while openly asserting the decorative fonction of painting and once more its texture in the work on the layers of paint,the glaze.Cecile MARCHAND combines the use of the gold leaf,iconography, illumination and the patern of squares:the pictorial dimension of the mythological or religious subject is not negleted as well as their embedding in a network made up of fulness and void, of scintillating and flashing squares.
This almost home-made demanding know-how is nevers related to turgid or metapictorial painting. There are neither irony nor overcoded religious glud.You just enjoy a technical skill which aims at creating a contact with a figure both familiar and yet vaguely fue. There lies the ethical side of her work not let oneself be dominated by the imaginary power without assessing the impact and the technical stakes.The figure may be seen in its elaboration throug the spectator's eyes.
For instance the treament of the colour based on alternate stronboscopic elements and glaze induces us to find the right point of view ,the one which will match the endless range of shades with the shiny reflections.
You will find no abstract expressionism, no ironic icons but rather a secret and frank common sense. If you attemp to look at her Madonna and languid hippos you need to get perspective, which means taking into account the art of posturing already mentioned.It is as if the assessment of Cécile MARCHAND'S work demanded that you should reach that superior state of abandon you find in her subjects which is sexy, detached, nonchalent and above all unfamamiliar.
If you do not identify yourself with the hippos reclining like an odalisk you will not see anything and will remain incomplete or torn apart.


Wisdom will be found in idols too.




Laurent Bilger

Translater: Mr Dominique Mutel