Byline: Liz Goldner

When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near her home. While the underpinnings of her work suggest eco-destruction amidst the natural environment, her completed paintings become exquisite, harmonious renderings that transcend the dystopian society we live in.

A visit to Thibeault’s 100-year-old home in San Pedro entails negotiating two expansive bridges with views of ships, shipping containers, cranes and birds. This journey enables one to experience the environment that Thibeault draws inspiration from. She has for years combined and layered details of these observed images into her paintings. And while she depicts these influences semi-abstractly, she regards herself as a landscape painter.

When I arrived, we began by walking through the home she shares with her husband to her backyard studio. The light-infused space is filled with her paintings, drawings, color charts, books, tubes of paint, art books and computers needed to teach painting and color theory Zoom classes at Cal State Long Beach (where she has taught for three decades).

In the comfort of her sprawling studio, Thibeault discussed her early life, growing up in Baltic, Connecticut, a rural town in the state’s eastern end. “My French-Canadian parents were not artists,” she says, “but they were artistic.” She was influenced by visits to the nearby Slater Memorial Museum, and its New England landscape paintings. Viewing these masterpieces inspired her lifelong love of landscapes. “By the eighth grade, I knew I wanted to be an artist,” she said.

Thibeault attended a nearby art school where she studied drawing and painting. She also learned about the work of the masters, including Paul Cézanne, known in part for his horizontal planes. “The picture plane in his work is moving and breathing as space that moves,” she said. “I learned to paint like Cézanne.” After graduation, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a BFA in painting, and later earned her MFA at UC Berkeley, studying with Elmer Bischoff and Joan Brown.

She moved to San Francisco in 1979, soon afterward immersing herself in environmental movements. The initial impetus for her green consciousness was the proliferation of aerial photos of disasters in local newspapers, “especially pictures of plane and train crashes and nuclear calamities such as Three Mile Island.” She began using these aerial photos as inspiration for her paintings, and continues to do so. Among the disasters she has depicted are Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. “Destruction is the pivotal point of change,” she explained. “There is tension between instability and balance, breakdown and recovery.”

Thibeault directed my attention to specific paintings in her studio, several containing “horizon lines.” She begins each piece by drawing and stenciling abstract industrial and natural images, many of them birds, onto the canvas. Working intuitively, she expressively applies bright primary oil paint, balancing these colors with muted hues. The results are semi-abstract, harmonious landscape-influenced works that explode with color. Two such recent paintings are Shield (2017) and Moving Cities (2018), both containing deep blues, greens and black, with obscure, densely painted imagery, referencing ruination in the environment.

The artist then showed me numerous drawings she began in March at the start of the lockdown. “I was blown apart by the pandemic,” she said, “and stuck at home teaching on Zoom. I was depressed and all I could do was draw, so I did three to four drawings a day.” While their shapes and forms echo those in her paintings, these drawings are more abstract and include medieval illustrations, astrological maps and ancient diagrams illustrating serpents, insects and birds. “They also use diagrammatic forms referencing global mapping and scientific charts,” she said.

Thibeault recently began saving medieval imagery from the internet and plans to employ these symbols in her future work. She explained, “With the current global pandemic and the effects of climate change, we are so much in the dark. And with many people embracing the type of superstition prevalent during the Middle Ages, these millennia-old images are particularly relevant to me.”

Sitting erect on a stool, Thibeault added, “Just as we turn to science to help us understand forces beyond our control, I am widening my view in my paintings to include a sense of global space and interrelationships, creating complex spaces with a sense of deep time, connecting the present to the past.” While her next paintings will continue to include environmental influences, they will aspire to further connect people to their surroundings and to each other, addressing what she describes as, “the tension between instability and balance.”

Years before the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” was initiated, the Museum of Latin American Art was exploring Latin and Latino culture. Its previous 2011–12 PST, “Mex/L.A. ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985,” explored the relationship between artists and supporters on both sides of the border, and included murals by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Yet in the current PST initiative, MOLAA is reaching beyond what is commonly considered Latin or Latino art with its museum-wide “Relational Undercurrents” exhibition. Covering the Caribbean islands, the show displays work from non-Hispanic islands, including Aruba, The Bahamas, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Haiti and St. Martin, in addition to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Curated by Tatiana Flores, a Rutgers University professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Art History, the exhibition addresses the so-called boundaries separating Caribbean countries and territories, and then artistically, historically and conceptually connects these entities through nearly 200 art pieces.

The show explores the work of more than 80 artists residing in these islands in today’s post-colonial era, while revealing their frustrations and desires. With many artists drawing on a common legacy of colonialism, issues of history, identity, migration, race and ethnicity pervade their paintings, installations, sculpture, photography and videos. Their work ultimately expresses the underside of Caribbean life—a world that is light years away from the advertised version of the islands as a tropical paradise.

One of the most powerful pieces in the show greets the viewer in the museum lobby. Scherezade Garcia’s In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise (2011) consists of numerous large, blue plastic lifesavers, bound together with plastic ties, each with a JFK luggage tag. Expressing the desire for freedom through any means—by boat, plane or lifesavers—this installation epitomizes the exhibition’s recurrent theme of yearning for a better and different world.

“Relational Undercurrents” is divided into four thematic sections. The “Conceptual Mappings” section includes maps and globes that re-imagine the world. Juana Valdes’ Under View of the World (2015), a cyanotype print with a deep blue background, appearing like the sea, features superimposed objects including gems, bottles and trinkets, appearing like islands. It evokes colonialism’s dependence on trade at the expense of the islanders. Firelei Báez’ gouache, ink and chine-collé on de-accessioned book pages anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River (2014–15), with female body parts superimposed over 19th-century maps, suggests the female islanders’ objectification by the traveling male patriarchy. In Ewan Atkinson’s Starman photos on light boxes (2009), the ephemeral superhero dominates urban scenes, implying the desire of the artist to overtake the environment.

The work in the “Perpetual Horizons” section focuses on the horizon, a constant presence in the islands, reminding residents of the borders that have kept them colonized and/or entrapped. Marianela Orozco’s digital print Horizons (2012) features a stretched out naked female as the horizon line, with a background of clear blue sky and puffy clouds. Yet its dreamy depiction of a female belies the deeper issue of degradation of women on the islands. Yoan Capote’s Island (The Night) (2011–12), a recreation of the ocean meeting the sky made out of fishhooks on jute on panel, is a poignant reminder of the islanders’ omnipresent relationship to the sea.

“Landscape Ecologies” address the environment as a place of shared ecosystems and habitats, referencing history, ecological challenges, and even disease and degeneration. One of the most alarming pieces in this section and in the exhibition is Tony Capellán’s Found objects from the Caribbean Sea (2015). This roomful of plastic cast-offs retrieved from the sea, including broken toilet seats, baskets, toys and waste from the medical industry, is organized by colors on the floor, from white to light blue to green to dark blue to black. The artistic arrangement of the detritus further emphasizes our besmirching of the environment, particularly in places bordered by the sea.

“Representational Acts” features work with political viewpoints in relation to race, gender, colonialism and more. David Bade’s My Name is Europe, Hi Europe (2014) is a large, colorful semi-abstract painting, depicting a jumble of characters; it conveys the foreboding that pervades much of this exhibition.

Antonia Wright’s Suddenly We Jumped (2014), a slow-motion video of the artist smashing her nude body through a sheet of glass, evokes the Futurists’ fearless “mortal leap”—her title quotes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who penned the Futurist Manifesto. Here, that leap seems expressive of a fervent determination to break through the subjugation of race, sex, nationalism and a centuries-old legacy of oppression. Jumped, then, viscerally embodies the mood of many of the works exhibited in “Relational Undercurrents.”