Marine Penhouët is a French pluridisciplinary women artist living and working in Brussels. The artist creates mixed media artworks, paintings, drawings, prints and installations. By referencing relics of the past, romanticism, psychedelia and symbolism, she touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and bygone chronicles. Her imagination travels back in time through repetition, deconstruction, collages and with the investigation of the process itself what defines a subjective present. Her mixed media artworks establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined. By exploring the concept of the landscape in a nostalgic way, she creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. Her artistic process based on an archaeological protocol between method and desire. She investigates the dynamics of images including the historic imprint. She reveal the remembrance of the past to keep awake the future by highlighted the importance of the dialectic. She manipulate those thoughts in installation, often made in-situ, where interact her artefacts made of mixed media as fetishes. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination. What really makes the sound of an image when we close our eyes?
Valérie Jacques