Marie Lannoo at Contemporary Calgary

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Marie Lannoo, “Polar Vortex,” 2021, acrylic on canvas (courtesy of Contemporary Calgary)

Painting’s obituary has been written countless times for close to two centuries. In 1839, the late French painter, Paul Delaroche, declared that “Painting is dead,” after seeing a daguerreotype photograph. While his words might be extreme, they capture the anxiety over this new and daring technology. But painting never died. Instead, artists found fresh and inventive ways to push the medium, drawing meaning and inspiration from other new technologies like holograms, optics or structural colour.

Enter abstract artist Marie Lannoo, and her illuminating exhibition, In Extremis, on view at Contemporary Calgary until Oct. 13. Her title is a Latin term meaning “at the point of death,” or alternately, “in the farthest reaches.” It’s an apt title for her sumptuous yet unsettling artworks that push painting to its extreme and luminous edges and elegantly embody the isolation and fear people experienced during the pandemic.

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Marie Lannoo, “Black Hole in Colour 4,” 2021, acrylic on canvas (courtesy of Contemporary Calgary)

Based in Saskatoon, Lannoo is an abstract painter who has explored the interplay between colour, light, and materiality for more than 30 years. A quintessential painter, her work blends (and bends) art and science into remarkable expressions rooted in colour theory and created with unconventional pigments, materials, and glazing methods.

In 2010, Lannoo shifted from pigment to light after discovering prismatic foil, a commercial material that diffracts white light into the full-colour spectrum. Through and Through and Through transforms an undulating metallic screen into a monumental, iridescent painting made purely from diffracted light. It’s a theatrical piece that contrasts beautifully with the more subtle paintings featured in the Observatory Gallery on the floor above, revealing a mesmerizing shift back to the splendour and viscosity of paint. 

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Marie Lannoo (photo courtesy of Contemporary Calgary)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lannoo returned to painting on canvas for the first time in 25 years but on a small and intimate scale. Trusting her skill and knowledge as a studied colourist, she painted instinctually, building surfaces in successive layers using a squeegee with tinted transparent gels. The paintings glow from within and pulsate with colours that emerge from within, disappear into, or shimmer across glossy surfaces that push against framed edges smeared, stained or splattered with paint. 

Twenty-four paintings hang individually on the wall or in groupings with one canvas displayed horizontally on a white shelf jutting out from the wall. Oscillating with varying shades of greens, blues, reds, purples and pinkish oranges, each painting is composed of stains, drips and acrylic emulsions merging into blurry, complex fields.

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Marie Lannoo, “Polar Vortex Pink,” 2022, acrylic on canvas (courtesy of Contemporary Calgary)

For example, in both Calibrated Variations and Polar Vortex 2, we’re pulled into blue-hued fields that illuminate our eyes and fill us with the opulent and atmospheric sensation of the open and changing skies. Other paintings like Liminal Spaces 5 and Liminal Spaces 2, appear as luminous portals or voids where colour is pushed or smeared to the edges like a delectable stain or an imposing miasma. 

In his book, What Painting Is, James Elkins uses the language of alchemy to explore what a painter does in her studio — the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable. Lannoo’s paintings are intuitively made with viscous gels and powdered pigments that form and reform into buttery, glossy, and watery receptacles or voids. 

Yet, despite their painterly properties, Lannoo’s work feels strangely photographic. Her articulated emulsions, filled with colour and light, embody rather than portray their underlying science. Lannoo’s practice offers a unique perspective on how we perceive and experience colour and light, both optically and emotionally, in art and in our everyday lives. ■

Marie Lannoo, In Extremis, is on view at Contemporary Calgary until Oct. 13.

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