My explorations relate to the interpretation of the vegetable world by means of old-time supports that I have experimented, as for my prints-fax, for 20 years. To express my subjectivity of Nature.
It’s a demanding metabolism of research because the plant is fragile. I give it a presence of eternity: black, white, with patina, interpreted. To fix its impermanence, to transcend its states, and to propose an incarnation.
Today I always filter these revisited techniques that fertilize my forms, where matter, materials and techniques are interpreted and poetized. I care about this thought in forms: it nourishes my vegetables questions. The transformation of materials, whether living, dry or mineral. Vegetables are also invented by hand. From hand to body, because my body is one with my explorations. Whether herbariums, sculptures or photographs. The body is the visible part of my dark introspection of Nature.
This research with photocopies-retables blends into my photomatons researches and the previous ones of the prints-fax.
(Marie Denis)
Alberta Pane gallery is very pleased to present the exhibition Nature des profondeurs by French artist Marie Denis in its Parisian space.
For her fifth solo show at the gallery, the artist will entirely invest the gallery's space by creating, with her new work on paper, a very personal enveloping universe inspired by the plant world.
Marie Denis has always worked on metamorphoses, those that time or her taste for paradox imprint on materials; those that the artist gives to plants, since Nature is her favorite field. In Nature des Profondeurs the artist presents works based on her "historical" approach, the interpretation of the plant world, coupled with a daily process: photocopying.
After having reused silver photomaton, patina or fax, Marie Denis sublimates here the prosaic nature of the ultimate office machine, the Sharp MXM316N photocopier from the école d’art de Fresnes where she has been in residence since the beginning of 2018. The exploitation of all possible diversions that she can operate with the fixed scan of the machine, transforms the latter into a photographic camera that switches these prints into timeless snapshots. Marie Denis often transmutes her own works, as in the exhibition L'impermanence at the Fernet-Branca Foundation (Alsace, summer 2018).
This experimentation with metamorphoses is, in fact, the thread of her work. Depths, simplicity and imagination, always at work.