Marie Thibeault
Marie Thibeault and Susan Mikula Reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the SF Chronicle
April 2, 2011
Marie Thibeault, Susan Mikula at George Lawson
By Kenneth Baker
The work of Los Angeles painter Marie Thibeault at George Lawson Gallery offers representations of breakdown, breakdowns of representation or both.
The idea that a painter's work translates her experience of the world haunts the art, making a purely abstract reading of Thibeault's pictures all but impossible no matter what she intends.
Awareness of upheavals around the globe - the catastrophe in Japan, the uprising and aerial bombings in Libya - also colors our reception of Thibeault's work, even though she made what we see here before many of them occurred. Humanity never runs short of crises.
But the drama of Thibeault's paintings consists not in their evocation of calamities but in how they show her wresting her attention free of dire events' dispiriting power.
A picture such as "Crossing" (2011) presents compositional architecture dissolved in a churn of gestures and hues that defies analysis, probably even by her. It inscribes the claims of the painting process on Thibeault's attention, as if they alone promised deliverance from obsession with demoralizing events.
The muted palette of "Crossing" sets it apart. The other paintings here affirm more openly that Thibeault also seeks a sort of consolation in painting's freedom to release color from reference.
So she does dismantle depiction to prove, as perhaps only painting can, that its spell - which stretches from our inner lives to our handheld devices - can still be broken.
Lawson also presents a group of photographs by Susan Mikula, whose extremely soft-focus approach at first brings to mind the work of Uta Barth. But Mikula arrives at her muted images, seemingly void of scale, by digital scanning of Polaroid originals, to generate rag paper prints mounted on crisp aluminum sheets.
By their peculiar combination of sharp materiality and ungraspable visual information, Mikula's pictures seem to set themselves adrift in time, neither nostalgic nor futuristic nor recognizably of the present.
Marie Thibeault in Art Ltd.
March, 2011
Marie Thibeault
By George Melrod
Although Marie Thibeault's paintings look frenetic at first glance--teeming with blocks of bold, jumbled color and scrupulous brushstrokes, mixing representational elements and pure, abstract form with disquieting abandon--it doesn't take long for one to see that they are, in fact, deeply considered and elaborately realized. Beneath their seemingly chaotic debris fields, there is an implicit, even desperate, quest for order. From amid the shards, hints of familiar objects emerge: in her last body of work, which addressed Hurricane Katrina, shells of cars, walls, windows, mattresses... The furiously fragmentary landscapes she evokes are both physical and allegorical. In a world choking with information overload and beset by natural and manmade disasters, they are symbolic frameworks for negotiating the volcanic instability that seems to underlie even the most normal, solid-seeming structures of our lives. They are also incredibly beautiful, offering sumptuous push-pull dialogues of unlikely colors and brilliant jousting matches between color and form. "I teach advanced color theory so I'm always looking at that stuff," Thibeault explains. "I'm into the whole history of it--Albers, Hofmann, Rothko... I'm kind of immersed in that and it influences the work. The challenge for me, that I'm always struggling with, is to reconcile my love of drawing with my love of pure color. They really don't like to be together, because they have different functions."
A teacher at CSU Long Beach for over 20 years, Thibeault lives in San Pedro, on the edge of Long Beach and the sprawling cargo port of Los Angeles; beyond, the coastal horizon is decked with towering refineries that cast spindly silhouettes by day and glitter menacingly by night. On the day that I meet her, her studio, a white-walled shed behind her home, is lined with paintings and drawings of all sizes and colors, in various stages of progress; before them on the floor are small stacks of scrappy color charts. She has recently completed a "one-night Kamikaze show" at Post Gallery in Downtown LA, of fifty drawings made on Yupo, a synthetic paper. "Oh, I draw like crazy," she says eagerly. "The drawing is where I think. I can't do without it."
In contrast to the immediacy of her drawings, the paintings that grow out of them are often prolonged affairs, made up of numerous layers with lots of trial and error. Often, she works on 10-15 pieces at once; the length of time spent on each work varies from as short as five days to "about a year, or until somebody takes it away from me." Although many of the works seem to suggest perspectives, they shift constantly as she engages the work from various orientations. "They're like these skewed things... I'm always inverting them. I do it like 100 times. It's not like I know what I'm doing. It's a desperation move," she laughs. "You're wrestling with this thing. It's always right around the corner. You can't see it because you haven't seen it before."
Thibeault's newest works takes as their subject e-waste, their abstracted landscapes strewn with accreted piles of discarded electronic devices, monitors, computers, wiring and the like. "That's what we're exporting," she observes, nodding toward the cargo port outside. Other works, like Rigged, which she created while the Deepwater Horizon was leaking, bring in separate, equally unsettling, environmental references. "I don't take just one image," she says, of her patchwork sources. "It's kind of a Frankenstein thing, I take many images from a massive image bank. They are constructed from pieces... To feed my imagination, I'm always looking for new structures. I'm interested in physics, systems, structures," she adds, citing in particular the late quantum physicist David Bohm. "When a system gets so chaotic that it loses its structure, it gets layered, overburdened... it emerges as a better structure, a higher order. And that's what happens in my painting. Sometimes it doesn't work. But that's what I'm going for."
Marie Thibeault and Stephen Westfall Reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the SF Chronicle
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Ill will swirls, Thibeault's elation prevails
By Kenneth Baker
The work of onetime Bay Area, now Los Angeles, painter Marie Thibeault at Room for Painting Room for Paper manifests one of art's paradoxes: its capacity to make something elevating of downbeat stuff, without false consolation.
We may associate this sort of transfiguration more with literary than with visual art. Think of modern writers such as Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, even Samuel Beckett. Visual artists who attempt it tend to be photographers, videomakers or conceptual artists, such as Alfredo Jaar, Chris Burden and Bill Viola.
Thibeault began making the paintings on view by gleaning from the Internet various images of disaster, projecting them on canvas and tracing some of their details to serve as armatures for improvisation.
Her "Arena" (2008) conveys the sense of a vast structure mostly in ruins. Despite its title, it never settles into description. So, despite what look like the ghosts of vehicles and architecture, the picture remains open to reading as the evocation of, say, an ideology or a social program in tatters. Or think of the unswept floor of a stock exchange, where a banner day's litter may look no different from that of a day of upheaval.
The eye can forget what it knows of reference - or not - once it enters the artificial paradise of aesthetic detail that Thibeault has contrived with color and shape.
Viewers expecting veiled social critique in Thibeault's paintings, such as they might detect in Julie Mehretu's work, may exit dissatisfied.
I find Thibeault's work a heartening refusal to let the never-ending crisis-consciousness that we call history deny us immediate pleasure in life. In this sense, her paintings come out against spite, and I admire them for it.
In the gallery's Room for Paper, New York painter and critic Stephen Westfall presents abstract gouaches that, like much of his work, attest to his unusually keen sense of cultural orientation.
Systematic patterns of evenly colored stripes, running edge to edge on floated pages, Westfall's works contain ambiguities that illuminate the context in which we seek meaning for them.
Might we mistake "Reign" (2009) for a rejected, or merely forgotten, idea for a mid-'60s color-field painting by Kenneth Noland? Or for a late work of Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)?
Might it be a snatch of foreign traffic signage, its meaning known only to the locals? A generic warning sign of Westfall's own invention? An obscure new national flag from the postcolonial world?
These uncertainties tell us something of where we stand in cultural space, as does the fact that none of them seems inherent in the work itself.
Westfall's work presents a pictorial intelligence disinterested in seduction but keenly alert to the pressures on visual interpretation.
Marie Thibeault and Stephen Westfall Reviewed in SquareCylinder.com
June 2009
Stephen Westfall in the room for paper
Marie Thibeault in the room for painting
David M. Roth
Synergy is one of the most overworked words in the American vocabulary. Yet when it actually strikes, as it does here with Stephen Westfall and Marie Thibeault– two painters who couldn’t be more unalike – the effect is galvanizing. Their individual achievements and the “conversation” they spark by their appearance in the same space make this a singular event. Each artist wrestles with similar issues and arrives at different conclusions. What they share is a belief in art that is rooted in bodily experience.
Westfall, the renowned New York painter and critic, creates gouache-on-paper abstractions that appear to be operating in the space defined decades ago by Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and other so-called “stripe” painters. While his vocabulary of chevron-shaped forms feels all-too familiar, the range of optical and emotional effects telegraphed by these highly focused interrogations of color and geometry seems wide-open. As with most painting of this sort, “form” and “ground” become interchangeable elements, which when adjudicated by colliding colors, yield highly specific evocations that demonstrate how even the smallest modulations can affect perception. How else to explain the myriad associations conjured by vertically bifurcated pictures that, for the most part, rely solely on downward facing stripes?
Westfall does drop some clues. Unlike geometric abstractionists who mask off lines with tape, Westfall applies pigment by hand, producing quavering lines that are only slightly opaque. He also tends to avoid conjoining sharp edges; his sometimes meet, but mostly they’re askew. But more than anything, Westfall’s off-kilter color sense is his most potent signifier: The
combinations he employs suggest many things without ever quite describing them. Thus, when you read titles like “Wrecking Ball”, “Fever”, “Lighthouse” and “Anthem”, feelings you
couldn’t put a name to come into sharp focus, proving yet again just how literal “pure”
abstraction can really be. (Small surprise that Westfall is this year’s recipient of the Prix de Rome award.)
Marie Thibeault — who hails from LA and creates complex, multi-layered, gestural abstract oil paintings based on photographs of natural disasters — takes the opposite approach: Where Westfall moves from the general to the specific, her works begin with tangible, physical events and build out into metaphysical puzzles that are cheerfully apocalyptic.
She begins by projecting news photographs onto canvas and then sketching the “architecture” that results from the superimposition of one picture atop another. She adds color swatches that, while frequently bright and multi-hued, read as monochromatic – a rather strange transformation whose origins probably lie in Hans Hofmann’s “push-pull” theory, which holds that colors, when correctly juxtaposed, can represent space just as effectively as conventional illusionist techniques – and wreak havoc with color perception, as they do here. Thibeault, who teaches painting at CSU Long Beach, has these tricks down. But she takes Hofmann’s teachings further. She uses sweeping (and sometimes very subtle) gestural marks to outline specific objects (cars, houses, buildings, swimming pools) and to create splintered geometric forms that define labyrinthine spatial relationships that mirror the shattered reality of places like New Orleans, the model for this series. In Thibeault’s rendering, as in real life, the surviving structures stand as shells; everything else is either kindling wood or under water.
At a superficial level, Thibeault brings to mind similarly inclined deep-space travelers like Julie Mehretu and David Hamill. But where those artists use the views enabled by computer-assisted architectural drawing (CAD) as jumping-off points to construct fantastical universes, Thibeault’s improvisations are based in fact. They take the all-too-real abstractions created by natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and explode them. Each of her pictures, while pictorially “whole” at a distance looks, up-close, like a series of inchoate marks. You can enter wherever you please and traverse their interiors, but there are few guideposts: The pictures unfold kaleidoscopically, with no obvious entry or exit points, just layers of continuously unfolding space.
Thibeault approaches the world phenomenologically, as something knowable through the senses, but the complexity of her work suggests there’s more out there than meets the eye. This show positions her among painting’s most adventurous explorers of that realm.
Marie Thibeault
Broken Symmetries
Torrance Art Museum
3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance
(310) 618-6340 www.torranceartmuseum.com
Broken Symmetries, by Jack Chipman, THE Magazine Of and For the Arts
Los Angeles painter Marie Thibeault's expansive, chaotic, and fully packed canvases evoke palpable devastation. Thibeault has a long history of painting abstractions loosely based on landscape. It was the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005 that prompted her current, more symbolic course of action. Although Thibeault has never visited New Orleans, she, like many others, found the story tragic and compelling.
The disarray in Thibeault's work, though intense, has an enigmatic order that helps keep the chaos in check. There's also a surprising grandeur to it all. The more you look, the more you see: half-submerged cars and trucks, uprooted trees, the pitched roofs of battered houses, and the skeletal remains of various architectural structures, all reduced to rubble. The one thing missing is the human presence. In many respects these are diaphanous, multi-layered debris fields, but overriding the grim subject is an artist's eye for color, shape and line. Thibeault has stated that she doesn't want the paintings to be about disaster per se. She's more interested in flux and the instability of the landscape. "I'm concerned," she says, "with finding and building specific visual metaphors and symbolic structures that express the idea of broken symmetries."
Thibeault makes numerous preparatory drawings, many of which were arranged on one of the exhibition walls -- a revealing visual diary of her working process. The completed works are certainly not quick sketches but epic paintings that evoke the disruption sudden mishaps can bring. The very latest paintings seem to be mirroring a particular topography, with one layer above ground and another below. Industrial elements of the L.A. harbor, near where the artist resides, also find their way into her newest work. Overall, these ambitious and thought-provoking paintings are visually rewarding, but they also serve as a graphic reminder of our planet's volatility and the vulnerability of its inhabitants.
by Jack Chipman
January 2009 interview with Marie Thibeault by Bondo Wyszpolski in Beach Reader Magazine (PDF)