Rhapsody for a Beloved World VIII, 2024
Marielle Plaisir
French-Caribbean Multi-Media Artist
Figurative and Surreal
Miami, FL
ArtMatch Value Score*: Promising
Marielle Plaisir (b. 1978) is a multi-media visual artist and activist whose art both speaks against social domination in various forms and promotes a vision of a beautiful world centered around channeling the good that exists in all people and the power of imagination. Born and raised in France to a father from Guadeloupe, Plaisir identifies as French, Caribbean and American. She now lives in Miami, Florida.
Her work is currently featured at the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida.
"I envision a world in which no one ‘dominates’ or ‘reigns’; instead, everyone moves freely between reality and imagination."
Image courtesy of Frederic Snitzer Gallery
Marielle's Story
When she was 17, Marielle moved from France to the Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe, a territory or “department” of France and the birthplace of her father. Culturally, Guadeloupe was very different from France. Much of the island’s population of just under four hundred thousand people descended from Africans brought to the island during the transatlantic slave trade. Her father’s ancestry is part of that lineage. During her childhood and adolescence in France, Marielle didn't give much thought to the significance of the color of her skin. As far as she was concerned, her skin color didn’t really matter. She was just a human being. The move to Guadeloupe was a cultural shock for her. The people there spoke French, but also Creole. There was a more complex sense of identity there, one that both embraced and resisted French government and culture. Over time, Marielle began to understand that the color of her skin carried with it a certain inheritance, a way of seeing the world and, in her case a duty to act to try to make the world a better place.
Marielle’s father was part of the bourgeoise in Guadeloupe and was thoroughly educated in French history. His education had a particular emphasis on the triumphs and glories of France’s famous rulers - Vercingetorix, Louis XIV, Napoleon I, etc. – and he passed these stories down to his daughter. Marielle’s father also shared the Caribbean fairytales he had learned from his family, stories that emphasized a symbiosis between man and nature with elements of fantasy and magic. What he didn’t share were stories about racism, colonialism and the legacies of slavery; these were taboo topics. As Marielle grappled with the revelation that some of her ancestors were enslaved, she decided that she would center her artistic practice around the concepts of domination and supremacy which were the underlying belief systems behind slavery. She would study how people who are born into situations of subjugation by a dominating force struggle for freedom. She would use her voice, channeled through her art to denounce social domination in all its forms. But in parallel she would channel her love of beauty, both in nature and in humanity, to show a better world, her idea of utopia, a more equal society in which people can freely move between reality and imagination.
Plaisir's Aesthetic
With an orientation around activism at the core of her practice, Plaisir uses various mediums to communicate her ideas. She creates paintings, drawings, sculptures, public works, and most recently backlit, photography-based works. These works feature layers of backlit, lenticular prints that create complex, vibrant three-dimensional images.
Rhapsody for a Beloved World VII, 2025
The Day I Heard the Sounds of the World II, 2024
M. Davis Give Me Five Guys and I'll Wrap this Up, 2023
J. Robinson: The Malediction of Cham, 2021
Plaisir's Process
As underlayers in her work, Plaisir uses archival photographs of Caribbean landscapes, her own photography, and symbols of dominance from renaissance and European colonial era paintings, while she foregrounds as main subjects archival images of children or well-known black writers, musicians and artists who were also activists.
Video
Watch Marielle discuss the philosophical underpinnings of her practice in this TEDx video (enable English subtitles):
References:
*The ArtMatch Value Score is our assessment of the likelihood of the artist's work to hold or appreciate in value. Numerical scores are calculated based on a combination of variables, including but not limited to type of gallery representation, number of solo shows, quality of collector base, number of pieces sold at auction. Scores are summarized to one of three ranking categories: emerging, promising, and strong. Note this does not constitute official investment advice and is given purely as an input to help assess artists from a value perspective.
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