Marinette Cueco collaborates with nature

About an exhibition dedicated to the sculptor Marinette Cueco at the museum Dunkerque - Le LAAC until March 5th.

Much has been said in recent years about Henri Cueco, an artist born in Corrèze in 1929 and who died in Paris in 2017, founder of the association "Pays-Paysage", a painter but also a writer and a trade unionist committed to the left, who was heard in the France Culture programme "Les Papous dans la tête" and to whom the museums of Les Sables d'Olonne and Dole have recently devoted very rich exhibitions. But what about Marinette Cueco? This visual artist born in 1934 in Corrèze is not only Henri's wife!

In the latest issue of Art Press, a magazine for contemporary artists, Richard Leydier reviews "L'Ordre naturel des choses", the exhibition devoted to Marinette Cueco by the Laac (Lieu d'art et d'action contemporaine) in Dunkirk. The journalist concedes that this beautiful rediscovery came a little late... The artist has indeed been developing a singular work since the 1960s, halfway between Arte Povera and Land Art, whose main materials are derived from nature.

Thus, in Dunkirk, four rooms unfolded her vegetable and mineral universe woven from her collections in the fields or in the woods, in her garden or in her kitchen. She who cannot throw away a garlic peel without seeing a masterpiece in it spends her winters making balls of her treasures, then knitting them into her works of art. Richard Leydier thinks of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the ecological fibre of a Jean Messagier or the spicy works of an Ernesto Neto, without hesitating either to go back to Parietal art and Neolithic arrowheads, or to quote Jean-Paul Forest sewing rocks in the torrents of Tahiti.

By sowing her pebbles gleaned along the way and swaddled in fine plant netting, Marinette Cueco has emerged from the shadow of her husband, allowing us to find her way back.