Hatchikian Gallery presents the artist Maryi and is pleased to share the emotion generated by the discovery of her work, an abstract and delicate work from which emanates great poetic sensuality. A beautiful encounter with an artist who is also a beautiful person, who pursues aesthetic research by opening spaces of silence where softness blends with the creative tension. A work that explores our condition as speaking beings, present in the world through our thinking bodies. How do we find our place, how do we fit into the common space-time by welcoming the nuances of existence?
Three prisms for artistic research
Maryi presents three series of works: Écrire, Poiein and Corps. Three series that the artist develops in parallel, and perhaps they should be experienced as three inextricably intertwined dimensions in our existences.
A writing of forms and pigments
The series Écrire is a way of touching upon the limits of words and proposing a different language that allows us to think together about the paradoxes and dualities by bringing them to life and infusing them with nuances. In the background, Écrire questions the singularity of the art of speaking. The title of this series, Écrire, is not without recalling that of a valuable testimony by Marguerite Duras, who engaged in a reflection on the barrier of language. «Écrire. Je ne peux pas. Personne ne peut. Il faut le dire : on ne peut pas. Et on écrit. C’est l’inconnu que l’on porte en soi : écrire, c’est ça qui est atteint. C’est ça ou rien.» Marguerite Duras wrote in resistance to composition and linguistic reason, proceeding through «fragments,» allowing a discursive movement consisting in «thinking while interrupting.» These magnificent words: «Writing, it happens like the wind; it is naked, it is ink, it is the written word and it passes like nothing else passes in life; nothing more, except her, life.» When Maryi «writes» her works, she places herself in a third place, a suspended space-time, and a movement occurs, made of forms, pigments, textures, a being-whole at once experienced and unfinished, imbued with lightness and gravity, with voids and plenitudes whose contours are never closed. The artist uses mixed techniques on handmade paper. She paints, collages, assembles, overlays, in a free poetic association of forms, like a dream. «Other forms,» «Writing,» «I was writing,» «Nothing more,» «Small papers,» works with titles that say the turmoil of the blank page and the beginnings. And others still, which approach truths that words fail to say: «I believe in the earth because it is there.» She makes roses,« or »First a sound, a form or a reflection.” The pigments that diffuse upon contact with the paper reveal nuances more subtle than words, in a breath that never freezes the subject matter.
The body, a movement of form towards the outside
Another series is titled Corps. Again, a work of exploration of the language of form through its corporeal existence. A look at the body in motion from the self towards the outside, from the interior towards the exterior, traversed by a force, animated by an incessant flow. What space does the body’s movement reveal? The artist stretches the forms, pushing them to their limits, to transcend the boundaries between the inside and the outside, exile and presence. An aesthetic that can be approached through the thought of the eminent philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work on the body is central. Jean-Luc Nancy defines the body as the «me in my singularity exposed to the outside.» «My body is me towards the outside.» And for the philosopher, there is only me insofar as I expose myself to the outside. Inside is only a punctuality without extension or possible identification. Bodies are not whole, he says. They are a distancing, they give rise to. These are places of existence, neither full nor empty, without outside or inside. They are the open space that gives rise to existence. In essence, he adds, «thinking the body is thinking the world: it is thinking the totality of the existing that, as an existing and turned outward, is also a whole.» For Nancy, «Art is always a movement of the body; a gesture charged with some impulse, momentum, pulsation.» It is this duality of inside/outside that Maryi’s artistic quest is about, through the choreographed deployment of the body. The abstraction of forms in motion comes as a representation of what incessantly animates us: finding space in a narrative that eludes us, in a perpetual flight of meaning. «Demeter,» «Plurielle,» «Elle,» «Il,» «Pneuma,» works that question identity and also bear witness to what the body writes.
The poetry of the hand that shapes
The series Is Poiein what links the body to the thought, to the language it produces? For the artist, this series is a tribute to the hand. The Greek verb Poiein refers to making, fabricating (by hand); it is also the etymology of poetry. A bond between the body, the hand, and the words? The making and the telling? The series of works Poiein explores what makes us human beings: alienation from language—our relationship with the world is irreducibly mediated by language, speech, and its ambiguity; words that always fail to grasp their object. In an era where formal language tends to disqualify symbolic language, where numerical and mechanical order prevails over «being,» this praise of the hand that shapes, leaving traces and imprints, as a poetry of imperfection is a breath, of its precious breaths that art offers us. This series is composed of works on paper made by hand in Asia, using recycled fibers that reveal their wrinkles and roughness. Maryi deposits colors and forms into the folds of this living, fleshy material. «Multiple hand», «Skin sheet», «In the skin», «I look at you with my hands».
A journey between Paris and Japan
Maryi draws her inspiration from Asian thought and it is no coincidence that a selection of her works Poiein will be presented at the Art Fair Asia Fukuoka in Japan this late September 2021. In Paris, we look forward to introducing you to Maryi’s work. We are at your disposal and we welcome you to our Art Loft to exchange and share our artistic emotions around the presentation of the works. Discover now the works by Maryi available in our collections.
