Marine Assoumov

painter and collagist

Ruins

The series of paintings on the ruins started in 1994. But Marine Assoumov has been dealing with this topic for a long time by realising pencil sketches, and she now draws it with ink wash.

So here is a topic which requests her particularly.

Marine Assoumov tells that her first drawings appeared when strolling in suburbs, at the sight of the destruction of industrial waste lands, provoked by the land speculation of the Eighties. It is curious to remark that these images thus produced were joined by a quantity of other images, coming from media, caused by violent and remote events, natural or human, that one thinks of the bombings of Lebanon or the earthquakes of Kobe. Marine could notice that cities, or fragments of cities, of various styles, countries and periods, were given by this destruction an incongruous likeness by the denuding of the structures.

The theme of the city has always been dear to the artist, quite simply because she was born and had grown in urban environment. It inspired her several other series, such as “the thriller” one, also painted with oil and collage.

But beyond the sentimental attachment dating from her childhood, Marine Assoumov appreciates the staging of the streets and the houses for aesthetic reasons. Moreover, didn't the first oil which she painted represent the frame of a demolished house?

For a long time, she has been interested in the layers of various materials or coatings, in the framework of the structures of torn apart houses. This stripping reveals the diluted patina of wallpapers and outside walls …

The rythmed repetition of the frontal stacking of the blocks plays in the composition of this “ruins” a vital role, which one can find besides in other work of Marine Assoumov: layers of the mental landscapes or packs of its players of rugby.

The buildings and materials seized in this state, the foundations, the beams and the stays thus discovered, lend themselves easily to pictorial treatments, either figurative or abstract.

And initially, the mere idea of destruction, the changeover from built to demolished, from full to emptyness, is a metaphor of the creation of the artist, and of the numberless obliterations which the painting undergoes. Patient and violent work of the painter, who destroys unceasingly to rebuild…

The series of the ruins rescues from oblivion these buildings or these cities destined to the final destruction. Marine Assoumov gives evidence of their existence. Ironically, a great number of these paintings are painted over the first oils that the artist created, an old substrate which gives them depth and relief.

Marine Assoumov was always sensitive to the fragility of livings creatures and of things. She attempts to save what is thrown or disposable: recycling papers and canvases, tickets and used stamps, advertisements, brushwood and plants to nourish the texture of its collages, covering with oil her old paintings when she does not liked them any more. In short, making new with the old.

The development of the paintings of the series which is done starting from old sketches, outline drawings without colour, goes in the same direction of a slow work of the memory, enriched by a progressive maturation and a rebuilding by the elements by reality.

However, if the rigour of a strong structure plays an essential part in these tormented compositions, there is no systematic use of preestablished geometrical modules. Sometimes appears a coloured line, whose role is not to delimit areas of existing tints, but rather to play with the composition, by transgressing it.

These sharp-edged forms are born from a slow development starting from a reality already marked by effects of opening, house-breaking and torsion. Painting picks up these movements and these moments when the interior is found outside.

Myrto Gondicas, 1997