This season, Marinette Cueco's avant-garden art is on display at Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière in Lyon, France, from June 5 to July 26, 2025. Displayed on walls, floors or integrated directly into the landscape, her works permeate our minds with a plethora of sensory information : visual, olfactive and tactile. Aura emanates just as powerfully from fragile or massive pieces. There is a certain perversion in the appealing displays-- Do Not Touch! Sensitive and powerful, Marinette Cueco's work is devoid of sentimentality. It would be a terrible mistake to relegate her work to the category of poetry & prettiness with the pretext of a compliment (captivating, graceful, ravishing) that denigrates as much as it praises what is often qualified as women's work.

Cueco Faber's forms cannot be poetic, since they are conceived outside language. From her mute aesthetic emerges what is given to be seen. Discussing it is another matter. The constituent elements can be described by so many syntagms – meadow chignon, pebble coverlet, grass interlace, ampelopsis roll, wisteria bundle, hemp rod - that resemble metaphors and accidentally delight our linguistic sensibilities. But let's not be fooled: their spirit remains firmly materialistic.

Marinette Cueco's ambition is to master nature as a source of both material and form. In the manner Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Botaniste sans maître, she studies plants in relation to her aesthetic research. When collecting the plant matter, she performs a purely utilitarian task, whereas her techniques for processing, ordering and arranging the material are creative activities. She doesn't imitate nature, she doesn't reproduce forms. She creates new ones that didn't exist before she imagined them.

Her creative process also has a performative aspect: doing work is the work. To invent her gestures, she draws on the history of the body at work. From traditional textile techniques she retains and adapts: weaving, spinning, knitting, crocheting, sewing; from agriculture: mowing, picking, pruning, shelling. To be effective, these actions need to be carried out with a tranquil mind, detached from worldliness, which is reflected in the works as they are produced. When we pay close attention, these thoughtful, scrupulous actions, recorded in the forms, appeal to our senses and give us the particular pleasure of botanical aesthetics.

During her lifetime, Marinette Cueco was much appreciated by fans of fiber art and landscape designers. It's time for wider recognition. For over sixty years, this inventive artist investigated the capacity of plants to be matter or medium, formal element or subject of research. Her singular art remains refractory to any iconographic interpretation. Her work is as informed about the crisis of representation as unstretched canvases, plein-air practices, the arts of the shovel and the bulldozer, or the arte povera that produces un sacco di ricchezza. For Marinette Cueco to refute consumer society with pomp and circumstance and question the relationship between man and nature within the rules of contemporary art, all that's missing is the protective cordon of a museum display. Or perhaps it would be better not to institutionalize the free spirit of this gleaner strolling through the aesthetic field of modernity.

(Text by Rachel Stella, 2025, exhibition curator)