Marie-Fleur
Lefebvre
The high level of chance and accident in Marie-Fleur Lefebvre’s work makes every one of her installations unpredictable. This fundamental unpredictability affects not only the form of the piece, but the very materials she uses, which include a variety of synthetic substances as well as elements found on site. Processes of wilful deterioration (tearing, stripping away) combine with raw gravity (letting things fall where they may) to produce performative accumulations that border on the abject. Their pictorial quality is what is left, after the artist’s gestures of renunciation, in tatters.
In literary terms, Lefebvre’s vocabulary would be the stutter, the cut-up, the vituperations of a Pierre Guyotat and a Thomas Bernhard.
Yet the muck of painting is highlighted (not elevated) by a certain sci-fi levity. Add Sun Ra, then, to Georges Bataille, so that violence can also engender cosmic relief. In all of her apparent disparaging of painting, Lefebvre’s maintains a lightness of touch, so that the mounds of painterly refuse become strangely regenerative, or at least negative enough to refuse complete dejection.
Antony Hudek, Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, 2020
The paintings and structures from Marie-Fleur Lefebvre are all derived from her artistic conviction that regards the medium painting as deposit, as waste material. In a literally aggressive act towards her own medium, Lefebvre sometimes tears thick layers of paint from her former paintings and uses these shapes to construct new, highly physical and gestural painterly structures. On the other hand, she works often in an almost sculptural manner with painting, and creates these thick acrylic painting-shapes independently from the ‘canvas’, and considers this carefully constructed artistic garbage as autonomous bodies or skins, who are finding themselves lost and forgotten in the wasteland between painting, sculpture and (post-apocalyptical) space.
Thibaut Verhoeven, SMAK, 2017
In her solo show Since Fish And Painting Are Maid, Marie-Fleur Lefebvre presents an in-situ work in Komplot's new venue. Lefebvre's work imagines paintings as 'deposits' evoking the notion of money placed in a bank or rubbish placed in the trash. As a painter, Lefebvre knows brilliantly how to adopt the role of the female author. Her work plays subtly around eroticism and romanticism.
In Lefevbre's holistic settings, the viewer is invited not only to behold the work but to enter it.
Stefaan Willem, Komplot, 2016