Thierry Raspail, Hervé Percebois, Judicaël Lavrador,
Hugues Jacquet and Sophie Phéline
Photographs by Blaise Adilon and Marc Domage
This first monograph on French artist Marlène Moquet (b. 1979) offers an opportunity to assess and appreciate the playful, obsessive, and fantastic paintings of this rising star in the international art world.
Playful, hallucinogenic, obsessive, and fantastic, the paintings of Marlène Moquet pose an enigma. Mocquet’s is a world of animated objects and anthropomorphic animals: birds, volca noes and beasts bleed into her raw surfaces. A rising art star, Mocquet’s paintings sold out in one day at her most recent Paris gallery show. This is the first book on her work.
Mocquet’s painting is striking for its singularity, spontaneity, and freedom. Drawing on art history — from Symbolism to Surrealism to Expressionism and action painting — as well as on more contemporary images from the world of manga and cartoons, her explosive painting, populated with animals, monsters, and anthropomorphic objects, leads viewers into a dreamlike and enigmatic universe.
Since her first solo exhibitions in 2007 at Freight + Volume in New York and Galerie Alain Gutharc in Paris, Mocquet has worked in a style of faux naiveté. Like someone who appears to stumble but who always recovers her balance, Mocquet uses technical accidents as the mainspring for her bizarre and often grotesque narrative.
This volume, published in association with Mocquet’s first museum exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon, France, in spring 2009, presents more than 100 paintings by this newly celebrated artist.
Thierry Raspail is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon and Artistic Director of the Biennale of Contemporary Art of Lyon.
Hervé Percebois is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon
Hugues Jacquet is an art historian and critic. He has worked for several art institutions including the Alberto & Annette Giacometti Foundation, the Harbour Front Art Centre in Toronto, the Cultural Department of UNESCO.
Judicaël Lavrador is a curator and art critic. He is a regular contributor to Les Inrockuptibles and Beaux-Arts magazine.
