Marie-Anita Gaube’s (French, born in 1986) paintings switch us into universes that have all instability of fantastic tales, with a radically plural spatiality and full of tiny details. It is a painting intrinsically unsettled splitted into playlets whose logic flees. Her large size paintings need a knowledgeable eye and a paradoxically intimate reading. A painting in motion, an image that anticipates and precedes the scene, an invitation induces one to see beyond the frame set by the image, to open up a path to imagination.

A lot of strange activities are part of her paintings where her figures are somewhat evocative of major painters of fantastic imagery such as Jérôme Bosh, Peter Doig, Odilon Redon and James Ensor. Bodies are broken, liquefied, scattered and progress in excessive environments to become inextricably intertwined with the depths. It is, as Marie-Anita Gaube puts it, “the theatre of the canvas”, something “out of time” which witnesses the comings and goings of the figures.

This transitional state appears like a complex construction of the space: beyond her games of juxtaposition, the superposition of elements and disparate plans that already used to encourage a certain circulation between objects and places reunited on canvas, here Marie-Anita Gaube succeeds in making this pictorial fiction even more complex, in particular by accentuating the discrepancies in scale in her landscapes; Hypertrophying the differences between the fore and backgrounds in order to better dig vertiginous rising perspectives.

Also, the colour acts like a disruptive element. She says, “ It has been applied as if to contradict. It sets it apart”, there is a discrepancy between colour and reality. Her gouache and graphite pencil drawings exist between two temporal states: A monochrome suspended in time, in contrast with a more present bursting forth with colour.

Thus, the artist gives us a work of narratives with visual clues to drawers and dreamlike universes that telescopes, which just asks us to pass through the mirror.

Marie-Anita Gaube (French, born in 1986) lives and works in Biziat (France). If during her training of Fine Arts she worked on installations, drawing and painting; it is following a one year exchange program in Mexico (Centro National de las Artes, Mexico City) and having graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, in 2012, she concentrated on painting. Quickly, her work has been exhibited into gallery and held critic’s attention: “At once a stage, a setting and a landscape, the tense space that remains becomes a wounded background; the objects that dwell there are idols reminiscent of Francis Bacon, while disparate perspectives, scales and motifs stand as invitations to pass through the looking-glass.” according to what Viviana Birolli said. Laureate of the Colas Foundation in 2015, she is currently pursuing her research in Residency, at Plessix Madeuc’s studios (Dinan, France).