Jean-Marc Decrop (2010)

An encounter

By Jean-Marc Decrop CNES Expert in Contemporary Art

It is in her house-studio (workshop) of the South of France that I discovered the sculptures of Marie-Noelle de La Poype. Planted in the ground or installed in cement plinths, they featured those surprising shapes recorded in the outlines of vertebras and bones of marine cetaceans. I was struck by this raw material, sometimes covered with a yellow lacquer carefully applied, giving a touch brightness and brilliance as well as an impression of silk and modernity.

When Marie-Noelle was speaking to me about her work, her husband was telling me about his last discoveries of marine mammals. A shared passion for nature and for this ancestral raw and primary material of bones, transported from Patagonia to give life to et astonishing sculptures of Marie-Noelle. I liked this work and the calm look that Marie-Noelle had on things, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The sculptures composed of bones – whole or broken – towered up, vertebrate as the impulse, in a quite symbolic verticality. Is it an attempt to communicate with the invisible, to join the absolute? Surprising totemic figures, they constitute a manifesto coming from the furthest times to express a sense of freedom, a certain will of surpassing.

The verticality takes place in both directions, the impulse towards absolute, but also needle which sinks into the depths, into the prehistory, into the foundations of the organic and the human being. It is also there, in the depths of mines, that Marie-Noelle will find the second material which she privileges to express herself: Slate.

Again, the sculptures are raised as raw materials, minimalist structures, testimonies of a human activity connected to the sacred. They evoke the rite and a druidic activity.

Her stone tapestries, following the example of Once Upon a Time, take the aspect of three troglodyte walls, which we imagine as the daily decoration of the human beings of the prehistory or of the extraterrestrials endowed with a futuristic technologie: it is at the same time simple and shows a surprising modernity.