“I have this need to create safe spaces for women, where there is no fear of look at their body. » In these closed doors, the characters of Marguerite Piard are borrowed from a softness sometimes prey to the black of the night, or sublimated by a solar light.
“I have suffered from sleep disorders and nightmares for years, expressing sometimes violent desires or fantasies. Painting them allows me to better analyze them, to calm down. » For her first personal exhibition at the Maestria gallery, Marguerite Piard invites the viewer into places of intimacy, where the confusion between reality and dream is born. This tension present in his work The Night of the Maratells the legend of this unreal figure coming to rest on the chest of its victims to take their breath away during horrible nightmares. His characters enclosed by walls still scented with the sensations of the day, illuminated by dramatic lighting, behind closed doors where anything can happen, often find refuge in the presence of the other. “These canvases harbor the idea of confidence and secrecy. We sometimes find more answers in our friends or our loves. » From March 15 to 27, your eyes can also land on caresses, captured embraces, blending skins, lonely women.
EXPOSED
Previously in her work, the artist who graduated from the Beaux Arts de Paris imagined dreamlike spaces for her women, such as The original red, symbol of the discovery of the first rules. Bringing together self-portraits or portraits of her artist friends, Marguerite Piard’s way of working is a way of rejecting the feminine exhibited in institutions, often painted by men. “By taking my body as a model, you can’t blame me for sexualizing the nude, for making it objective. I wondered all the same if, as a female painter, I escaped de facto from a certain male gauze, when it comes to approaching sexuality in painting for example, or to represent very intimate scenes. » For this exhibition, we find these timeless spaces, reassuring as softened by the sun or darker, as symbols of the exploration of inner troubles.
Of the twenty canvases exhibited, there are many miniature formats, which reinforce the idea of intimacy according to the distance between the viewer and the work. We sometimes have to approach to see the details, as if we were trying to see through the peephole of a door. The majority are painted in oil on wood sometimes coated with plaster, or sculpted in low relief. We then see body fragments, curved backs that do not hide the folds of the skin, half-hidden half-unveiled lower bellies, portraits gazing at the shadow of their silhouette lit by the sun. During an exhibition, one of his works was almost licked. “It was a portrait of a naked woman, a man approached his tongue near a nipple and asked his friend to take a picture. I was flabbergasted, I couldn’t do anything. » Marguerite Piard creates spaces as if painted by the sun, where body and mind are free, where kisses are protected, where fears are dissipated by the softness of her feminine gaze.
I sometimes have people alive that give me insomnia
Marguerite Piard
Maestria Gallery, 7 rue Saint Claude, 75003
Par Mathilde Delli