Myriam Chair is pleased to present Marion Artense Gély's first solo exhibition, La Quête des lucioles (The Fireflies' Quest), from Thursday November 30, 2023 to January 20, 2024.
Crédits Photos : Romain Darnaud
Born in 1995, Marion Artense Gély lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) in 2020, and has been in residence at POUSH Manifesto in Aubervilliers since 2021.
Painting is the medium of choice for Marion Artense Gély's artistic practice, enabling her to explore worlds a priori beyond the reach of our senses; where the reverse side of things resides, where evanescent forms appear as transitory states. The contourless motifs that emanate from her canvases create spaces of equivocal dimensions, where the infinitely large and the infinitely small write stories in which dawn and dusk seem to meet. Marion Artense Gély employs the ancient techniques of glazing and sfumato in a logic of incessant repentance (each canvas resulting from an accumulation of 50 to 120 layers of oil paint). His gesture is akin to that of an archaeologist on a quest, among the strata of ancient worlds, for a trace of what once was, however appalling or grandiose, however foreign or visceral.
Just like her immersive installation, Moon Burn, (2020) which took her to the slopes of Mount Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii, where the native Hawaiians speak of an invisible force, Mana, which permeates the universe and from which the essence of souls is said to be made; and where astronomers the world over scan the celestial vault in search of the dark energy that is said to make up 70% of our universe, 70% of the unknown, the invisible. This was followed by Altar (2021), a photographic, aesthetic and anthropological study of Breton "standing stones" from the Neolithic period, which inspired Marion Artense Gély to create a new medium, this time sculptural, in which the repetition of gesture remains, but the figurative emerges.
Force, Energy and Emergence, the trinity at the heart of her painting, now resonates with her ceramic work. A ritual established in anticipation of the long drying times implied by her painting technique, which she now uses to apprehend a haunting Emergence: the living.
