PARIS.- Marie-Anita Gaube’s (French, born in 1986) paintings switch us into universes that have all instability of fantastic tales1, with a radically plural spatiality and full of tiny details.
It is a painting intrinsically unsettled2 splitted into playlets whose logic flees. Her large size paintings need a knowledgeable eye and a paradoxically intimate reading. A painting in motion3, 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 Ensor4. 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 figures5.
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 perspectives6.
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 colour7.
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).
1 Viviana Birolli and Marc Desgrandchamps , Texts published in “Marie-Anita Gaube : Dérives“ Catalog accompanying the exhibition, Ed. Progress Gallery, 2014 with the support of the CNAP.
2 Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Text published in “Marie-Anita Gaube : Nouvelles Aires“, Catalog accompanying the exhibition and published by Galerie Françoise Besson, 2015
3 Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Ibid.
4 Viviana Birolli, Ibid.
5 Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Ibid.
6 Marion Delage de Luget, “Marie-Anita Gaube : Out of Place“, issue n°28, 2016, Analogues publishing
7 Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Ibid.
