[Sleepless Nights] on the Art of Marzena Lavrilleux

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [Hand-Rolled, Post-Coital]

At its most precious limits, art has lost its way and found it within a new identity, an inane idea. If art stands in its current place, it may find itself in peril of decapitation; altercation is not enough, it must change, and not just change, evolve- its need is in the interest of being led to its forbearance and way from the guillotine, away from dismemberment.

This altercation is held in the hands of Orleans-based painter Marzena Lavrilleux. French-polish in descendancy, now alive in the aura of what once was the childhood home of Edgar De Gas, there is nothing, nor anyone who exists juxtaposed to her, for art is not a dream she has once dreamt, it is the dream she has moved into, sporadically re-emerged from as a conundrum ineffable, incapable of being fully comprehended.

If she has found anything that has scattered from the trauma of birth, she has found herself in the world, herself lightly upon the earth as the moon directly above her head has made a strenuous endeavor to lift from her a restless spirit.  And as a meteor that collects its gravity in the rays of the sun, Lavrilleux finds momentum in the methodology of existence, that is, in the world of her art.

Note the painting [Eclipse], an unbelievable depth in a chasm of surreal, an encounter of an abandoned town and its macabre ending, a setting where each and all things can be set free, return at will, if it may desire. One is reminded of poverty-stricken villages, browns, blacks and golds that assimilate in the sky as a loom on the floating horizon. What is removed from the haunting image, is resurrected in [Elephant]. A marvel, a marriage of depth to birth, then a plummet to an abortive sea of distortion, a molar pregnancy in a cadging womb demanding life in a most brilliant, grandiloquent plead. The angels can deny not, the demons can ignore not the angels frazzle to bedazzle, beloved and beget. It is, as in [District] is as nothing I've seen, deep abstraction, abstractive dimensions, seemingly unafraid to unleash its color upon the eye. It's color is its prayer, an finite expression to live- not in human interest but in its own.

Lavrilleux gesture is the gesture of seduction, the same, it can be the gesture of miscarriage, a sensory of failure as the brain. Her gesture must empty itself onto the earth if it is to become a criterion of this earth, the haplessness, the bliss, the fertilized, the calcified fetus. Let her gesture be what it is, what it may, enraged in the image of itself, the dew that depends on winter to imprint its moldlessness upon the pane. If there is a darker, most desolate corner of Lavrilleux, in her art, it flickers at a phase as to allow only one view before the arrival of again, a lighter gesture.

 In [Fashion Victim] there is a consistent them of tragedy, the vanity that is both bold and unforgiving, an unbecoming of women who've used up there inertia of life in time, bodies broken, battered, severed in the glamourous beauty of the doctrine they lived by. One thinks hastily of Gia Carangi, of Archana Pandey, Ruslana Korshunova, Hayley Kohle, Daul Kim, names of women who walked till the runway gave way, dropping them into an abyss. It is only in this painting that Lavrilleux allows us to live in victimhood, bygone victimhood, illegitimate nostalgia, overwhelming portraitures of what remains is only names. The sporadic flicker is now at its most solid state of being, alienated, the body of misery builds its own mausoleum, retracing its own steps time over for centuries.

   In this hideous reconciliation with the human miasma, we are beckon to rest in our misadventures with [Sleepless Nights.] The intervening distance, the equidistance from bliss to the plunge into our own dark corner is aided with the grey shades, trees hidden in a different shade of grey, a touch of infantile brown solidified as a vacancy. This vacancy rests in a vacuum, where body and space intermingled in a vortex of misgivings. This is a modern reminder of the fall of the altercation, a change at its most malevolent, most unvarying.