Nemeton / Maude Maris
Anne Langlois, 2015
The work of Maude Maris is a universe in which sculptures and paintings feed off each other. The artist creates casts of natural or common objects that she depicts in the form of models, which she then photographs and reproduces in realistic and dreamlike paintings. Her sculptures, which are similar to those depicted in her paintings, lie between abstraction and figuration of familiar shapes. Playing on mirror effects, cross-referencing and changes of scale, all of her work creates a space that immediately positions us as the only human beings in these strange scenes populated objects.
For her exhibition in the courtyard of the Rennes Museum of Fine Arts at the joint invitation of 40mcube and the museum, Maude Maris will be demonstrating this relationship between her paintings and sculptures. The exhibition consists of a series of six new paintings whose perspective induces the height of their hanging, vis-a-vis the Nemeton installation: a forest of columns, each cut into half of their height and separated by four small branches made of plaster. The glass roof of the museum courtyard overlooking the exhibition gave the artist this idea of an architectural forest contained in a sort of huge veranda. The cut columns are inspired by an architectural perspective drawing from the XVIIth century by Andrea Pozzo, representing a column separated by four brackets, as if it was in storage. Here the brackets are replaced by an artefact of their origin: the branch. The column itself, which is polygonal, is covered with a ?bark? coating.
The set of paintings and sculptures combines different stacks, elementary gestures of construction common to children, architects and sacred rituals (Lego, temples, headstones, dolmens and sacrificial altars). They talk about our relationship with nature and the world, which we need to direct in order to inhabit materially and spiritually.
The smooth crafting of the paintwork and the background with its indefinite horizon make the scenes possibles on all scales, open their evocative power and allow for shifting interpretations.
The title of the exhibition and installation, Nemeton, which means both forest and sacred shrine in the Gallic language, replays on this ancient relationship between vegetable and mineral, which is notably present in sculpture and architecture. The ritual dimension contained in this term is not without interest to Maude Maris, more in terms of atmosphere than explicit narration, her work always leaving the spaces represented open to a slight mystery and some ambiguity.
Anne Langlois (co-director of the 40mcube)
Text published for the exhibition Nemeton, Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes (06.06 - 06.09.2015). Curator 40mcube.
Introducing / Maude Maris
Julie Crenn (Artpress n°407, January 2014)
Combining painting, volume and drawing, Maude Maris constructs a visual and mental universe of carefully articulated forms, objects and colors.
When she left art school in Caen in 2003, Maude Maris painted artificial landscapes, gutted houses, caves and aquariums, gradually articulating a meditation on the ruin and an idealized representation of nature. Her landscapes seemed frozen in time, bathed in soft light and unreal colors. The latter came from synthetic materials used to make environments and from objects conveying a reassuring vision of nature as something
mastered. She is also interested in architecture and space, which is why she spent a year in the Hubert Kiecol's atelier at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. « Whith him I was looking to find the rigor and high standards I needed for my own explorations. »[1] There she worked in collaboration with architects and produced mainly three-dimensional objects. She was also inspired by some of the German art she saw : the photographs of Frank Breuer and Thomas Demand, sculptures by Imi Knoebel, paintings by Thomas Huber and architectural projects by Gottfried Böhm. Maris's intensive visual experimentation gave her work a new dimension. Between 2009 and 2010, she collected Internet images and reprocessed them using software. « I wanted to get a grasp of all the different parameters related to the question of viewpoint ». She sets out her objects in a virtual space bathed in artificial light, composing her still lifes on the screen before transferring them onto the canvas. The software enables her to modulate the intensity of the light and create zones of shadow which divide up the space in another way. But while this gives her increased control of the light effects, she loses the relation to material and color. Consequently, it is necessary to appropriate. « I couldn't see the point anymore of working with objects and images that didn't belong to me. » So she then started looking for objects related to the idea of a controlled nature : toys, everyday junk, decorative elements. After cutting, polishing and casting in plaster, the trace of the object is painted in synthetic colors such as blue-green, silver gray, pale pink, beige or gold-brown. The new objects are then laid out in a threesided box open at the front. These compositions are photographed and then painted on canvas. The final work is thus a result of a long process punctuated by filters leading to a smoothed image. By getting rid of thickness and texture, the artist aims to preserve an almost surgical effect of distance in relation to the object.
THE WORLD ON STAGE
Initially Maris worked with a single object, developping a meditation on isolation, the solitude of an object placed in an empty, neutral space. Gradually other objects came to colonize this same space. They contribute to the theatrical character of her work because they perform the function of both props and characters. As her casts accumulate, so the artist builds up a collection of objects, which she classifies in families defined by form, color and power of evocation. She sees them as « characters that share the same stage. »The colored casts are set up in a room whose appearance may be natural or domestic. These silent, enigmatic actors call on our memories, our imaginary and our history. Maris thus extends the art of memory put in place, among others, by the Italian primitives, one of her main sources of inspiration. Their paintings feature open space which convey different time frames and, consequently, generate several different narratives within a given work. Maris's still lifes are frozen in time and space. It is for the beholder to move around within them mentally so as to penetrate their secrets, which are at once alluring, appetizing, and fascinating but also disconcerting and unusual. Based as it is on constant sampling, the imprint constitutes a driving element in Maris's work. Casting found objects is a first kind of imprint. Her three-dimensional pieces are also imprints of painted works. Indeed, the sculptures represents the hidden side of the paintings. The artist uses the floor-plan of her objects, taking their outline and cutting out their silhouettes in sheets of colored polystyrene. The sculptures can thus be read as ghosts. They partake of the creation of environments in which photographs, paintings, sculptures and drawings come together. If we are able to enter the paintings, and find our way round the objects, we will come up against the things that exist behind the scenes, off-camera, out of the frame. « Volumes are the exterior and the paintings are the interior of the space. » Maris encourages us to enter her soft, unsettling world. She recently started knocking down the walls of the boxes she works with, letting in natural light. Each action, however slight, has a host of consequences. Reflections, colors, brightness and shadow, are no longer the same. The theatrical dimension is gradually fading to let in the real-complex, impossible to control and unexpected.
