Marielle Plaisir: After Icarus

‘After Icarus’ is a solo exhibition by Marielle Plaisir at Fredric Snitzer Gallery that takes ‘The Fall of Icarus’ as a framework for considering the contemporary world. Rather than focusing on Icarus as an individual mythological figure, Plaisir approaches the fall as a systemic condition—one in which certain bodies, histories, and experiences disappear from view while the world continues uninterrupted.

In the painting attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Icarus is almost invisible. The farmer continues to plow, the ship sails on, and the landscape remains luminous and indifferent. This absence of attention becomes central to Plaisir’s work. Across the series, Icarus becomes a collective and fragmented body, representing those who fall outside dominant narratives and whose disappearance leaves the established order largely unchanged.

The paintings and drawings move between presence and absence. Bodies appear fragmented, displaced, running, floating, or seemingly taking flight. It remains deliberately unclear whether they are falling, escaping, or reaching upward. Landscapes become silent witnesses, holding traces of bodies that have vanished and histories that resist disappearance. The uncertainty of these gestures suggests that the fall is not necessarily an ending: to fall can also mean moving, transforming, resisting, or finding another way of being seen.

Beauty is equally central to the work. Drawing from her Caribbean, Guadeloupean history and French cultural heritage, Plaisir considers the complicated relationship between beauty and power. Textiles, gardens, architecture, fashion, and decorative traditions have historically produced beauty alongside systems of domination and erasure. In After Icarus, she reclaims these visual languages, turning beauty into both seduction and resistance.

Ultimately, ‘After Icarus’ asks what it means to remain visible in a world accustomed to looking elsewhere. If Bruegel’s Icarus disappears beneath the surface while life continues around him, Plaisir reverses this logic: her fragmented figures insist on being seen. They do not simply represent the fall; they occupy its aftermath, carrying memory, history, and possibility forward. In this sense, ‘After Icarus’ is not a meditation on disappearance alone, but on the persistence of the body—and its capacity to reemerge, reclaim space, and imagine another future.