The artist toys with a split personality. He turns to his own personal history as an artist and performs a virtual excavation of his work unearthing a series of drawings produced with ballpoint pen between 1998 and 2004.
For his first solo exhibition at the Crèvecoeur gallery, Antoine Marquis toys with a split personality. He turns
to his own personal history as an artist and performs a virtual excavation of his work unearthing a series of
drawings - never before exhibited - produced with ballpoint pen between 1998 and 2004. The pen represents,
for him, the most straightforward means of drawing, with no possibility of erasing. A sort of pre-language, a
“primordial soup” peopled with subjects mixing up archetypes from the “culture of genres” the artist has long
nurtured that encompasses série noire (crime/thriller fiction), eroticism, fantastique, science fiction, fantasy,
horror, westerns, etc.
He decided to weigh these drawings, in an extremely cold and almost clinical manner, against a quite different
and more recent series of pencil drawings that are meticulous, considered and of a distinctly classical stamp.
The only motifs are faces and bouquets of flowers. That is to say, portraits and still lives, tried and tested
genres in the history of art, though ranked differently in the hierarchy of pictorial genres codified in 1867 by
André Félibien, listing his classification as “History, the portrait, the genre scene, landscapes and still life.”
There is, to be sure, something of all that in Marquis, except that History becomes (small) history, the genre
scene more of a rude skit, the landscapes dressed like science fiction sets, and with the portraits taking French
cinema’s cast of supporting actors as models. Then, the bouquets, cose naturali (the term coined by Vasari
before the name “still life” became popular in the late seventeenth century) par excellence, are so polished and
so obsessive that they are somehow disquieting.
As already mentioned, Antoine Marquis brings a split personality into play. It could even be what is known
as a Manichean split in psychological terms (a subject’s conviction that he is simultaneously inhabited by two
complementary yet opposed characters, each taking it in turns to live): indeed, how do we consider an artist
who sets rudimentary scenes done in biro against the portrait of Aurora’s ethereal features, the subtle confi-
dante in Eric Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee, or against a portrait of French cinema’s perpetual supporting actor,
the placid Jean Bouise? Perhaps, through a serious symptom: the certainty that in drawing and its economy
of means, the genre study harbours endless possibilities on the question of representation in a world saturated
with images. And this artist’s images are open to a potential renaissance through readings on variable levels:
image-sign, image-narrative, image-myth.
Antoine Marquis was born in 1974. He lives and works in Paris. He has organised and participated in sev-
eral exhibitions in dedicated spaces such as the CNEAI, the France Fiction gallery, the Plateau-FRAC Ile de
France, the Mac/Val and the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (Une expédition, curated by Stéphane Calais).
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