Marie Denis — Les yeux derrière la tête — Alberta Pane Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 2 → May 28, 2011

For her second solo show at the Alberta Pane Gallery, Marie Denis presents a new series of works that aim to uninhibit notions of beauty and decorative. The exhibition “Eyes in the back of the head” invites the visitors to widen their field of view, and multiply their senses when contacting sculptures ranging from the very large to the very small. Marie Denis wants above all to produce endorphin and to create pleasure with the perception of her works. The exhibition’s principle direction follows the ideas of customization and reemployment, which are manners of reinjecting research into forms already created. Deconstruct, reconstruct. From the Cambodian plastic bag to the peacock’s feather, the artist transforms her sculptures and objects by revisiting the materials that constitute them.

The peacock feathers are again emphasized with Azul, an ensemble of eight fans captured under frame, like samples analyzed under oversized slides. The radiation of delicate adjusted feathers evokes a notion of the Uncanny, described in Ernst Jentsch’s essay written in 1906. Hundreds of peacock eyes stare at the observer who discovers this plumed layered glass, becoming this ocular sculpture’s third eye.

Melle Choura, an amply-sized sculpture inflated with the help of a ventilator, is an immense sack made up of hundreds of colored, plastic bags, like those that overrun the landscape of Cambodia. From this involuntary pollution and poetry, Marie Denis wished to create an oversized object of wonderment with acidic colors. Other curiosities, dear to the artist, are presented above the seats created for the exhibition on which the visitor will meditate: glass spheres, photographs, fax prints.

“Real charade in movement”, Marie Denis deciphers and transforms the material to give us a personal, poetic and fanciful definition of sculpture.