Marie Losier

French artist Marie Losier has become internationally recognized for making poetic portraits on 16mm film of avant-garde musicians and filmmakers that transcend documentary conventions. In them, she exposes her topics of interest, as well as part of herself, an imagemaker dedicated to analog film in the digital era, with an unlimited drive to create artistic projects with others.

Losier was based for many years in New York, where she arrived in 1994 to study painting, having quickly entered the orbit of stars that would appear later on in her photos and films. She designed props for playwright Richard Foreman and learned to film on 16mm camera with underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar, at the Millenium Film Workshop. For Losier, intergenerational connections go hand in hand with a cinematic drive to channel a fetterless spirit of artistic creation and collaboration. Her highly personal body of work, which ranges from intimate portraits to funny performance films with costumes and sets designed by the artist, music videos, and genre narratives, is unified by her intuitive attention to rhythm and to the compositions she handcrafts with her camera.

Filled with markedly physical comedy, reminiscent of silent cinema and the burlesque freedom of North American underground filmmaker Jack Smith, Losier’s cinema is, above all, rooted in performance. Each shoot is a live event (or shared experience), in which Losier, with her portable Bolex camera in tow, is as much participant as creator. The playful costumes and changeable codes coexist with poignant explorations of identity and body.

The artistic work produced by the artist, from film to photography, music or drawing, was the starting point for the exhibit at Solar Cinematic Art Gallery, as part of the 30th Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival. The work developed over the last two years led to the elaboration of an exhibit called “Excesso Chamalo”, created by the artist in partnership with David Legrand, one of the masterminds behind the innovative and multidisciplinary project “La Galerie du cartable”, which will also be presented during the festival. Together, Losier and Legrand also conceived, especially for Solar and for Curtas, a new film codirected by both. Solar will also host an array of installations, drawings and movies, a guided tour of the exhibit with the artists, a conversation between Marie Losier and Portuguese directors João Pedro Rodrigues and Sandro Aguilar, as well as a series of film screenings within the scope of a “Carte Blanche” designed by Marie Losier, in which she puts her movies in dialog with some of her favorite auteurs. 

Nuno Rodrigues