Atrium 2022

At the heart of this beautiful exhibition, there is a magnificent painting entitled: The 7 Paddlers. Its theme is at the origin of the title: "Cosmic Canoes". We see 7 silhouettes paddling in the maelstrom of celestial, terrestrial and underground worlds, fulfilling a tradition that is thousands of years old: the tradition of the sacred journey, which disappeared with the Spanish conquest...

Each of the artist's paintings is like a quest that begins with a shared dream, dream of a totem animal, made up of three questions unified in a representation recognizable by its strange head and its multiple limbs: the Kioukan (the Who? the Where? and the When?). Structuring the canvas, it becomes an active representation that interacts with the memorial traces that, in each of us, question our place in time and space.

All the strength and beauty of this exhibition, which is perfectly summarized in the painting "The 7 Paddlers", is to allow the viewer to navigate like a cosmic canoe, a skiff that is both fragile and solid, on the turbulent waves of Destiny, to discover our forgotten memories.

Laurent Marlin