Maude Maris draws us into troubled and uncertain worlds. The landscapes she creates reveal a repertoire of forms borrowed from a reality impossible to identify with certainty. Some objects seem familiar, though: ruins, glaciers, fossils, entrails, mummified limbs. Maris draws the subjects of her paintings from her collection of small plaster artefacts cast from found archaeological, geological, classically sculptural, and architectural objects and remnants. She assembles and photographs these objects, before painting them in large-scale format. This shift in scale and identity is disorienting, rendering the viewer incapable of situating the forms in a physically recognizable environment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through resonance, repetition, and mirroring, the objects appear like mirages, hallucinations, doubled and lost in the blur of an absent horizon. The artificiality of each scene is emphasized by the contrasting textures of outgrowths and protrusions resulting from material corrosion. The forms, which seem to have been carved by the persistent flow of a glacial stream, are generally unrecognizable. From the cool light emerge bruised blues, orange expanses, and marbled roses; like reborn flesh blushing with blood-red pigment. Despite being marked by erosion, these mineral shapes hint at animal forms. The light, acidulous colours of Maris\u2019s early work have been replaced by more organic hues, closer to flesh tones, in more recent works, as though the paint could breathe life into the assemblages, in a kind of temporal inversion of the fossilization process, and tell us something about the living. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once assembled, these objects seem to act as cairns that allow Maris to set forth on a path toward a new classification of the world, an orientation guide for the shifting identities of materials. By denuding surfaces, she seems to wish to put worldly objects on equal footing in a kind of flat ontology that postulates that everything can exist and evolve without hierarchy within painting, or even through painting itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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