Marianne
Gagnier
Maurice Arlos Fine Art
85 Franklin Street, New York, NY
212 965 5466
October 29 to November 23, 2002
By
PATRICIA BAILEY
Marianne Gagnier
The Last Fish 2002, oil on linen, 34 x 46
The artist courtesy Maurice Arlos Fine Art
It is surely no
coincidence that Marianne Gagnier has taken two seventeenth-century
artists as her starting point in this remarkable exhibition of darkly
poignant paintings. She has found rich visual inspiration for a contemporary
urban theatre of memory and imagination in the landscapes of Claude
Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin. From this theatre her personal mythic
repertory company gestures mutely to us. But unlike the gods and goddesses
of classical mythology which fill Claude's and Poussin's worlds with
a longing for another time, Gagnier's characters offer no stories with
moral or narrative solutions: despite their sometimes borrowed settings,
these are contemporary works. Like dream personages they defy simplistic
characterization; they do not readily signify. As in our most powerful
dream scenarios, the mysterious and apparently cataclysmic events they
enact seem drenched with profound enigmatic significance.
The objects and
personages in many of these paintings are portrayed in a broad painterly
manner reminiscent of late Rouault, an effect that comes partly from
the extended process of reworking the images. In the best of them, Gagnier
has worked hard to find the necessary descriptive balance without losing
her sense of the poetic whole. It was the search for this ideal that
drew her to the paintings of Poussin and Claude, and she has worked
repeatedly in almost abstract, tonal underpaintings which borrowed the
light and spatial balance of her favorite works.
Gagnier also shows
that she can imbue the natural world with dark romantic symbolism and
power. In the several versions of "Plenipotentiary", a subject
she revisited over as long as a decade, Gagnier honors the totemic memory
of a great ancient apple tree on her New Jersey farmstead which split
apart and died not long before she left the property. It is by the reflective
light of the moon that the great tree is lit, against a dawning sky,
and several of her paintings have this simultaneous quality of solar
and lunar light within them.
Ultimately, for
Gagnier, living in the natural landscape did not provide the personal
reconciliation and harmony she was seeking, and the landscape itself,
more and more framed by parking lots, lost its relevance. She realized
that she was interested in an idea about the classical world that was
"different from the American sublime, idyllic landscape."
In describing her search to me, Marianne Gagnier says, "It is not
that nature is perfect or unknowable, outside of us. Humans must be
part of nature. We are in nature."
The dream of classical
Arcadia, the possibility of a place and time where we lived in harmony
with nature-and ourselves--perhaps endures in the collective unconscious
as a deeply human need. It is different from our dream of Eden, the
place from which we were, by definition, separated. Knowledge and practice
of the ancient philosophical/physical science of alchemy was disappearing
during the seventeenth century, at just the time that Poussin and Claude
were painting in Italy, and surely, like Gagnier, also dreaming of Arcady.
In his researches into alchemy, C.G. Jung found that he had to return
to the 17th Century to fully intuit the astonishing parallel he discovered
between alchemical symbolism and his study of the psychology of the
unconscious.
A further connection
between the alchemical idea and Marianne Gagnier is subbested when one
learns that during the time she was making these paintings the artist
lived through three catastrophic fires. The first was a devastating
studio fire, from which many of the paintings in this show were salvaged
and repainted; the second, the burning of her parents' home; and the
third, the long, slow burning of the World Trade Center just south of
her studio. In the presence of Gagnier's paintings, the impression which
comes is of an artist's poetic attempt to reconcile inner and outer
worlds. When the boat sets sail from the safe harbor toward the light
horizon, leaving the "Last Fish" behind on the quay in the
empty city, it is ultimately an image of the artist's--and our own--ongoing
individual voyage toward the unknown.
