Mathilda Marque Bouaret

On canvas, cardboard, metal or brick, Mathilda Marque Bouaret’s paintings have in common a curious form of strangeness accentuated by their apparent clumsiness. They are awkward images. They emanate from a dreamworld where more or less deformed characters are frozen in postures that are at once familiar and absurd. Mathilda Marque Bouaret jots down mental images or scenes she glimpses in notebooks that contain the kernel of each painting. She tries, she says, to surprise herself. Which explains the unease derived from the situations that the artist portrays. The light, colors, and forms bear the stamp of artificiality, which the bodies merely reinforce. Mathilda Marque Bouaret’s imagination is restless; her paintings hesitate between humor and fright. Two snails embrace on a beach, goofy-looking seagulls fly over the characters, two hands cup "an endive like a little bird," the naked back of a figure of uncertain gender makes for a troubling pearly mass: the images’ enigmatic nature and their half-naive, half-ironic treatment make for disconcerting viewing.

Mathilda Marque Bouaret belongs to a generation that chose painting in order to portray its dreams. Their unsettling character lends this enterprise the cachet of cruel truths.

In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse