Didier Marcel

Didier Marcel’s oeuvre has been coming together before our very eyes. It has taken on its true sense, however, only with the passage of time, acquiring density and logic, not on the basis of a pre-existing intention that was then meticulously put into practice but thanks to the faith the artist himself seems to have in his insights, and the patience with which he has allowed them to develop. It will not be claimed that over two decades he gave his imagination free rein, attentive only to his impulses as they connected up a certain number of intuitions which now, a posteriori and flagrantly, present themselves to us in the form of a remarkably homogeneous set of works whose combinations and recombinations seem potentially infinite. Before anything else, the “method” (if this is a word that can be applied, retrospectively, to the process), which subtends Marcel’s work, stands before us today in all its splendour and self-evidence, far – very far – from the glibness that marks out most of the younger French artists, whose doctrine seems to be the “logic of the headline-grabber”.

Marcel’s work, capitalising on the experience gained in the production of the “small objects”, and the presentational strategies that allowed them to take their place in the architectural configuration of a museum, was deployed almost systematically in the form of a juxtaposition of landscapes that revealed what can now be seen as a seminal project: to be a portraitist of landscape in the 21st century, with the invention of places defined by “closed limits, determinate uncertainty, contained information”.

Eric Troncy