Ilinx : Marion Verboom

THE PILL® is pleased to announce ILINX, Marion Verboom’s solo show in Paris. For the exhibition, Verboom presents a recent selection from her ongoing series The Achronies which she debuted in 2016. The Achronies consist of columns made from a variety of natural and manufactured materials which create a spatial dialectic. They represent an amalgam of archaeological vocabularies, arranged as totems and steles recalling the evolution of human existence. 

These column stacks can be rearranged in new sequences by interchanging the modules. Over the last few years, Marion Verboom has developed a layered working method, a modus operandi for working with matter that operates in a vertical mode, units of measurement, transversality, time loops or families of forms: evoking geology, anthropomorphism or architecture. The elevations are constructed by associations of forms and materials, obeying a method of stacking on a vertical axis. 

« The vertical axis of the matter is also called Time » to quote the artist. The forms evolve organically with the passing of time and intercultural crossings. They move with the hands of the one who forms them and influence each other. However, they remain markers that temporize while testifying to the life of a civilization. Thus, the elevation and juxtaposition of fragments form a chronological or anachronistic core. These fluctuating columns in time and space, which rise as quickly as they fall, form in their uniqueness an architecture, a small temple dedicated to the images of the time. 

Marion Verboom's Achronies are highly structured objects that respond to a strict verticality. These works firstly evoke column shafts, as the artist calls them, but more precisely ancient columns, characterized by a certain relationship between the diameter, the height and the assembly constituted by the stacking of drums. They also take on the appearance of geological cores, showing a superimposition of very diverse materials accumulated over time. These columns are a very close image of the stratigraphic sections visible on the archaeological site. In these stratigraphic sequences, one can see archaeological elements, fragments of sculptures, bas-reliefs, etc., traces of a distant past, but placed indifferently in the lower, middle or upper parts of the work, directly associated with elements that are more reminiscent of the modern period or the industrial age. The artist develops her practice as an art of memory. Her artworks are triggers for reminiscences, they summon up the notion of the collective unconscious, or that of Proustian signs which, after a certain amount of time, send each visitor back to his own memories.