Cosmovisions : Eva Nielsen & Marion Verboom

Press release
During a trip to Mexico, painter Eva Nielsen and sculptor Marion Verboom, explored Mexican, Mayan and Aztec architecture, both vernacular and contemporary. Nielsen and Verboom are interested in the organic aspect of these architectures invoking hidden worlds that seem to reappear on the surface of the world. Inspired by Luis Barragán and his architecture, a symbol of the blend of modern architecture and Mexican culture, the exhibition affirms the power of these visions of the world by mixing multiple cultures hardly present in the founding myths. Between naturalism, stylization and geometrization, a history of past and future forms is at stake, that of the ruins of a civilization that has been or is yet to come.
 
These cultural, memorial, symbolic representations incarnate in isolated forms, architectured in the shape of imbricated head and faces, at the same time half-woman half-animal with the orbits and gaping cavities. Taking hold of the environmental dimensions of fantasy topographies, or either their traces or mirages, Eva Nielsen's landscapes are bathed in a feeling absence of duration. She paints places in reconstruction or artificial spaces with alternative geographies by integrating the serigraphy to reconfigure fragments of reality. Scrutinizing both modernist and ancient forms or volumes, her Archiheads, pre-Columbian and Celtic vestiges, proceed from a flattening of urban and architectural realities. While the silkscreen screen filters, veils and obstructs, the painting unveils and releases a skyline. A statement of changes between the city, its periphery and other territories, the subjects of her paintings with granite textures and earthy colors are always at the rim: between heaven and earth, between painting and image, between experience and reconstruction.
 
Out of time, Marion Verboom's sculptures are also part of a timeless and rough material, like skins reminiscent of the depths of the worlds: earth and seas like topographical surveys, anthropomorphic fragments, fossils and masks to look like nesting dolls. In her Achronies - hybrid totems, Marion Verboom proceeds by stacking, arranging and playing with materials that reveal the different layering, molding and manipulation processes of the ceramic material. If the clay soil draws the sedimentary layers, the gesture is that of a loop where the hand intervenes to transform the material. Marion Verboom integrates the asperities of form, the correlations between the material and its mass, the search for lines and volumes and thus digs a historical material that she finds in the ancient and early arts.
 
Constant tension between the transient and the monumental, the exhibition is stratified and unfolded by these hybridizations and mutations: those of frontier places and passages, the world of the living and spirits, both spiritual and pagan beliefs. Eva Nielsen and Marion Verboom confront these artistic legacies and these historical narratives in the form of a quest for imaginary territories with hybrid origins. Cyclical and non-linear, their works dialogue together generating their own temporality drawing from many civilizations connecting them to the underground forces that populate them. By this telescoping of civilizations and cultures, the exhibition literally opens the doors from one world to another, from one fable to another.
 
Marianne Derrien
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