The work of Marine Hugonnier examines the politics of vision. Across multiple media, including film, photography, and work on paper, Hugonnier engages with the subject of the gaze, putting into question how images are produced and consumed. Her interest in the relationship between language and image, and the deceptive quality of both, highlights the failures of grand social endeavors, as well as the attendant failure of images to convey them accurately.

Part of an ongoing collage series initiated in 2004, - Art of Modern Architecture
builds on the sense of loss for the Utopian aspiration of Modernism. By covering the front-page images of historical newspapers, in this case, the Spanish daily newspaper El País, with silkscreen colored paper, from a standard Kodak color chart, Hugonnier breaks the temporality and the narrative structure between image and text, affirming the artist's strong skepticism about the informative and documentary capacity of images, while putting under question the viewer's memory and the collective consciousness of the events depicted. Despite the physical flatness of the work, it is characterized by a depth of chronological intersection, bringing together the viewer's present, the past of the documents, the time of the event's unfolding, its later interpretation, and the time of manipulation by the artist. Inspired, like much of the series by Ellsworth's Kelly's book, Line Form Color, a seminal piece calling for art's connection with public space, and establishing the modernist utilitarian project of art serving modern architecture, Hugonnier's Art of Modern Architecture renews Kelly's ideas and re-elaborates them within a new medium, that being the medium of a newspaper, the purpose of which is to frame everyday life.

MC