MARLENE MOCQUET EXHIBITED HER WORK AT THE MUSEE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE LYON (13 FEBRUARY - 19 APRIL 2009)

Melding surrealism with the sublime, Marlene Mocquet drips her canvases in oils, acrylics and gouache, creating an effect equal parts ethereal, warped and fantastic. Each disparate picture registers as a character within a greater aesthetic alphabet that Mocquet employs to describe an absurd microcosm of players and scenes.

Mocquet's lucid formal vernacular is reminiscent of early Paul Klee or at times Max Ernst in her affinity for symbols and otherworldly stand-ins. The aesthetic qualities of Klee's almost primitive early drawings and paintings appear in delicate ways throughout Mocquet's arrangements. Her work also lays claim to such disparate sources as Art Brut, the Cobra Movement, the grotesquerie of James Ensor, the exquisite palate of Emil Nolde, and the transcendent botanicals of Odilon Redon. The artist's coarse mark-making and the faux-naïf of subject matter presents an almost brutal and seemingly outsider quality.