| Somehow I can just picture Marie-Josie Vielot trolling an endlessly vast shoreline in search of her favorite medium. In the context of her prolific career, the artist apparently never tires in her search for the perfect seashell to complete her intricate creations. While most artists take up as their medium such immediately available, store-bought media as pencil, paint or clay, Vielot opts for a more tedious and random luck-based challenge. |  |
Marie-Jose Vielot – Simone Cappa
Somehow I can just picture Marie-Josie Vielot trolling an endlessly vast shoreline in search of her favorite medium. In the context of her prolific career, the artist apparently never tires in her search for the perfect seashell to complete her intricate creations. While most artists take up as their medium such immediately available, store-bought media as pencil, paint or clay, Vielot opts for a more tedious and random luck-based challenge. For this reason, in looking at each of Vielot’s framed works, the viewer is most immediately struck by her intricate appropriation of found objects from nature’s shores, and how difficult and time-consuming it must have been to find all those perfectly shaped shells in just that right hue. More than anything else at her solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery this spring, the artist’s complete mastery of this highly alternative creative process is what stood out most brightly.
Much of Vielot’s oeuvre consists of renderings of elaborate, thinly layered floral life that incorporates hundreds of found seashells into each individual piece. The resultant artwork is undeniable in its near perfect likeness to the flowers of the earth, but it is also extremely beautiful in its own right. Vielot’s works glisten with the polish of the sea and make for solid, never-wilting incarnations of the floral variety that we humans seem so much to adore. Though we set a vase on every mantel and bedside table we can, our chosen arrangements always fade in their unfortunate ephemerality.
For this reason, Vielot’s tireless work is to say that, with a little imagination and even more patience, this reality does not have to be so. Seashells, for Vielot, are the flowers of the sea and are meant for arrangement and display. In the same way that men and women throughout time have brought the flower into their homes to liven up the place, through her work Vielot proclaims this joy of nature does not have to end simply because petals often wilt.
Perhaps more in line with the likes of Matisse’s bare-bones cutouts of the last century than with the floral appropriation of the readymades of nature’s shores is Vielot’s extensive “Faces” series. Here, the artist again takes as her medium the shells of the sea, but you might never know it. So miniscule are the shells that she incorporates into this series that one must ask how Vielot differentiated these from the sand of the shore itself. Nonetheless, Vielot manages to locate a seemingly endless supply of thinly shaped, delicate and cast-off carapaces like these with no problem, but this painstaking task is only the beginning.
In her “Faces” series, Vielot’s virtuosity becomes wholly apparent. By arranging a minimal number of these oddly shaped shells onto her background, Vielot creates the complete likeness of a human face every time. In employing so few lines/shells to depict her subject in this way, the artist’s mastery here lies in the fact that the viewer is forced to read between those lines in his or her search for the subject matter at hand. Rather than rendering the complexity of a human face in perfect realism, Vielot’s outline of only the most essential of her subject’s features tells more about them than a realist oil painting or photograph ever could. Here, Vielot captures the subject’s boundless complexity as un-renderable. In this way, the artist successfully recognizes the mystery of the human face as an uncrackable one, and seamlessly captures its basic essence accordingly.
In end, Marie-Josie Vielot’s art goes to show that some well-studied, patient and artful arrangements of the sea’s natural resources can replace the likes of oil paint, trips to the florist and even the photographic lens. Her work is to say that it always pays to take a closer look into the wealth of the natural world all around us.
www.joscreations.net
