Mental landscapes

The “Mental landscapes” of Marine Assoumov emerged in 1998, in the continuity of a work which was expressed before on different topics: studio fragments, ruins of cities or rugbymen in body with body …

Through the diversity of the themes, the pictorial technique of Marine Assoumov presents a constant: thick oil spread out with the palette knife, with more or less apparent superpositions of the coats of paint, giving a matter richer than a simple passage. This depth is all the more present that the artist often puts back on the stocks his work, taking again old paintings, scraping old paintings to re-use the support of it. On the basis of nonvirgin paintings, as the sculptor who must adapt to the material he works on, Marine builds the painting starting from the colours and of the relief preexisting to her intervention.

This share of chance in the development of the painting contributes to give to certain paintings this “laboured” impression of thick crust, which takes part of the design of the abstract paintings. The paintings of Marine Assoumov, and in particular her landscapes, are located at the crossing of the abstract and the figurative one. But from the structure to the detail, from the light to the shade, isn't one always in the continuum of the same pictorial representation?

In addition to the work of the paste, which catches the eye in the landscapes of the painter, there are the broad flat tints of vibrating colors: solar yellows, reds garance or vermilions, frank or slightly ochred greens, shaded and deep blues. These more or less sharp contrasts, always harmonious, create a true dynamics in the apparent statics of the flat shades. If for the layman, painting is essentially expressed by color, then Marine Assoumov, by the richness of her palette, is truly a painter.

Marine Assoumov also reveals herself by the built character of her paintings. The eye wanders from the spare figurative character of her landscapes inspired by images stolen from the media or by memories hastily sketched during walks or voyages, evoking such stripped Tuscan countryside, such chalky cliff, such alternance of striated fields, to the almost pure abstraction of coloured areas where only remain some flat tints of intense colors, spread out in thick and frank layers: blue of a sea (or yellow according to the inspiration of the artist), grey of a sandy beach, patches of green, flows of brown, a point of red in balance… Does the idea of a landscape still cling to the painting, or does not it evoke nothing but itself, a pure composition of forms and colors?

So the painting of Marine Assoumov is linked, involuntarily undoubtedly, to the “teaching” step of the passage to the abstraction inaugurated by artists like Mondrian or Kandinsky. But from this community of inspiration, Marine Assoumov works differ by an originality and a sensitivity which are her own, by the richness of her colour palette (the alliance of the tone producing this very peculiar atmosphere), and by the contrasted expression of her landscapes, which go from a stripped structure to construction of a multiplicity of contrasts of light keys.

Christiane Peccoud, 2004