At a given moment, you have to make the incision, open up, part the flesh.

At a given moment, you have to square off, define the operative field.

At a given moment, you have to go there, move, come close.

With the very first feature, I’m there, the whole of me is in what I’m doing, I am inside, I don’t attempt to close it off, I allow colour to chuckle, the building to come tumbling down, what was taking shape to collapse. Now I don’t know what I’m doing, but I go for it, I don’t stop, anger mutters, the image rises up in front of me, the more so if what is coming grates.

There is a nasty moment to get through, before it exults once more. At any moment, I’m well aware, it can bugger off, the battle is by no means won, it devours the whole surface. This, then, is the moment to carve out a path, the precise moment when I have to seize the opening, the gap.

An entire world in a puddle, an entire world becoming orderly, ramifying. Suddenly, there’s an outline, it stands out clearly, it slips into a blur. I recognise pieces, I recognise moments. All of this has to be brought back up to the surface, I’m going to lose some en route, no time to lose.

One space eats up another, one face swallows the next. All that is left is an arm, a leg, an eye, a rump, wreckage, a beard, a swarm of kids in shreds. One head erases another. A head, you might as well say a gaping, a butting, there you are, I’ve swallowed the cup, I’ve swallowed the head. The cheeks all eaten, the edges are all clipped.

Before the gap closes again and gobbles up all these spaces, all these beasties, you have to stop, let it dry. Battle joined, phantoms released, the canvas is rolled up, the canvas is pulled on to a stretcher, the canvas is turned to face the wall, the canvas leaves the studio.

François Durif

Text written when leaving Marine Joatton’s studio on 20th of May 2009 - English version : Anna Crowe

In the intimate experience of esthaetic concepts that lead her far away from imitating styles, Marine Joatton meets processes where one can recognize Hugo, Michaut and Cozens in their speculations about stains, but also Artaud and Basquiat who both discovered some kind of reversed sublime, and Baselitz when he dismembered bodies and gave the gesture of painting its monumental scale.

The traditionnal distinction between « scene » and « background » seems absolutely lapsed in Marine Joatton’s work. Figures she draws continuously return to their original state, that is a shapeless scrap of a sketch, almost nothing, near complete fade-out. Each breaking out of a stain on the back can turn into a finger, a leg or half of a body, or else into an entire creature that appears there like a solid Jack-in-the-box.

Though as soon as the creature seems to reach some king of completeness that would make it look almost friendly, it instantly disintegrates, crumbles, breaks into random scratches and layered erasures. The Figure returns to its original state, the never stabilised background of the image that probably makes up the actual matter of the piece, that and not the uncanny or the invention of figures. Prolific Marine Joatton generally works by adding expressive elements that gradually colonize the blank space.

The surface of the paper or canvas is a field of infinite germinal experimentation. She works just as much multiplying abstract graphic sequences (such as spots and lines) as repeating figurative hints, some of which are openly related to a sexual body. The symbolic forms she uses (fingers, horns, phallus, branches, buds) could refer to a naturegenerating and proliferating sexuality, whose extraordinary life force turns the whole background into a fertile pantheist delirious field, clogged up with semen and bodies in gestation, drafts in becoming, dedicated to auto-fertilization and multiplication… The area of the paper then looks like the open field of wall painting, where figures can cover up and bury one another endlessly, where multiplied bodies can developp in extenso in all directions of space..

Emmanuel Rivière, November 2007.
Translated by E. Espargilière

If dogs could draw, but it’s not sure they’ve ever been allowed to, their graffiti would no doubt resemble ours. We would see contrary things in them, things unsaid, a concentration of cannibalising obsessions, an entanglement of forms with hesitating identity; the master licking his dog, limbs couched on the image, the bottom of men, guessing games with nothing to guess, plenty to worry all the cats and poodles.

All of this, and more, can be found in the drawings of Marine Joatton. What they have in common with dogs’ drawings is that they let things get on with themselves, not wanting to do things right, not seeking to reconcile scrambled forms nor untangle what has been patiently scrambled.

This way of maintaining awkwardness and parasiticness, inventing a derisory mythology and preferring imperfection over easiness, could make you think of the unpredictable path of the mole in her fight against the lawn, or a seamstress undertaking to make holes in order to stitch them up again: it can be disconcerting but there is a certain pleasure to be taken in it. That of the wild beast delicately devouring her prey, or a child carefully massacring her favorite toys. Carnage, but voluptuous carnage.

Marine avoids the principal disadvantage of drawing: that of calling, for want of time, a thing by its name. And you could ask what makes a successful drawing, when its success depends at once on it not being finished – so as to leave the digesting bit to the mind – and on not really being able to see in it precisely “something”. On the contrary, in Marine’s drawings, you can see whatever you want, and especially whatever you don’t want to see.

Not describing, marking page territory with painstaking scribbles, rubbing out your tracks and walking in your own steps to believe you are being followed, getting attached to things so you can’t get rid of them, is, after all, quite as valid as drawing.

We can miss lots of things, the train, a step, the beginning of a film or the whole point, and to get back on track curse the architect, blame the actors, the complications of syntax or ourselves. We can also consider that time is too early, that the step missed the foot and the train the arrival of the traveller; we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that hitting is never more than missing deferred, but that practicing “faux pas” and holding up failure as success could be nothing but a gently suicidal enterprise if, as we must admit, success was never in fact on the menu.

Henri Bordes, 2006

Clawed paws, salient penises, sad-looking children; hatching, erasures; flayed, crucified, and faceless bodies; raw landscapes and primitive scenes unfettered by formal constraints: The painting of Marine Joatton is a chaotic, forceful, free emergence of tirelessly repeated elements - stray strands of a short-circuited narration that resists all interpretation.

The large format compositions (115x150cm or 200x250cm) are constructed on a luminous, monochrome background. They hint at an enigmatic, obsessive material that is proscribed, at all costs, from coming into existence. Forms and backgrounds sometimes merge. Smudges and expressionistic smears, but also clear lines and pure shadows in the subtle drawing of a hand, primary colours both candid and violent - all create an aesthetic of the unfinished, the hybrid, full of mistrust for the manifest, explicit or perfect form.

The painting of Marine Joatton challenges any notion of revelation. Perhaps she only seeks to replicate, from within herself and from what she has gathered in the world around her, so many versions of a primary convulsion. Its nature suddenly seems to become clear, like in the portrait of a pensive soldier boy, reminiscent of Rimbaud - but then it escapes, once again to remain mysterious.

Frédéric Boudet, writer, author of Invisibles, published by Editions de l'Olivier, 2006.
Translation Nicola Wissbrock.