Maude Maris
Born in 1980 in Caen, FR
Lives and works in Paris, FR
The animals who float through the dreamy atmospheres of Maude Maris’s new paintings are mainly ones she knows from around her studio in Normandy: a cat, a bat, and a snail are among them. Each seems endowed with a magic whose properties we can’t know, as if at the center of a creation myth just unfolding. The cat, viewed from above, rests on a blanket of night sky, stars arrayed before it like playthings. The bat hangs before a brushy field of blue, joined only by a disc of moon. And the snail glides through an overcast sky, the barest suggestion of land beneath.
These paintings differ considerably from the artist’s last body of work. In those paintings, Maris followed an elaborate process of translation: She would start by casting small, found figurines, especially of animals, in plaster. She would then pose, photograph, and depict the plaster forms on canvas, enlarging them to monumental scale. This series of translations lent the original objects an apparently ancient power and the juxtaposition of one or more of them suggested mute conversation. Maris painted the animals, seemingly hewn from white marble, in cool, iridescent gradients, as if pulled from a liquid crystal display.
Working from her studio in Normandy, Maris recently chose to follow a freer, more painterly approach, liberated from her sculptural models. The animals, too, seem liberated from their obdurate objecthood. Yet they still possess a coldness, a distance, a silence.
