Marcel Cousins

Exhibitions

Built Environment - 2007

Marcel CousinsBuilt EnvironmentNovember 13 - 24, 2007 In his latest show 'Built Environment' Marcel Cousins considers how the images we create condition and impact on the way we experience our surroundings and interact with the world around us. Graphic, stylized trees, rendered in a reduced palette of black, white and green, distil Cousins' experiences and impressions of particular landscapes. The large-scale treescapes are skillfully executed using a combination of photography, computer graphics and airbrushing, which serve both as tools to capture scenes but also as filters to transform them from their original setting and mould them into interpretations of the environment around him. Masterfully manipulated, they no longer have any texture. They are stripped of any identifiable link to the real context in which they were originally photographed. No clues are provided about time or location. The paintings are in effect sanitized images of a place that does exist, somewhere in the world. Each image captures and condenses something we have personally experienced yet which feels far removed from our own reality. It sits somewhere in our cluttered consciousness along with the myriad of other images we have seen but not experienced. Despite the absence of physical and cultural identifiers in this body of paintings, Cousins work is clearly influenced by his extensive overseas travels and the past six years that he has spent living and studying in Japan. "Cousins is typical of a newly emerged contemporary category of artists in Australia; they are not concerned so much with identity but more with how an Australian sees the world - they no longer go inland, they go overseas - and they go equipped with a certain mental detachment and visual discernment. Cousins is a wandering eye"¦"¦ He wanders - we wait and watch for the results. What we eventually view in his sophisticated paintings and prints are not the false commercial images of tourist postcards, but the aesthetic reconstructions of a highly informed and perceptive artistic imagination.' Dr. Ken Wach, Associate Professor, School of Creative Arts, The University of Melbourne These works mark both an extension of and conscious shift from his earlier series in which Cousins explored the way ubiquitous images of mass communication and popular culture codify the world around us, easing us into understanding but also serving as a way of showing us what to know and how to know it. The beauty, intelligence and subtle complexity of Cousins' work has attracted the attention of curators and collectors. Cousins is represented in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank and the Michael Buxton Collection as well as significant private collections. He has won six major art awards, completed two large commissions and been included in public exhibitions, most recently 'Blast: The influence of Manga and Japanese culture on Australian artists' at Redcliffe City Gallery and Logan Art Gallery, QLD.

                   

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Lustre (Melbourne Art Fair 08) - 2008

                         

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