Marie-Pierre Fontaine

Marie-Pierre Fontaine lives and works in "the old Tours". in her home,the visitors can discover a universe out of time: animal figures, cheeky Madonnas, baroque lamps, furniture made of recycled materials; all these elements provoke astonishment and questions.

Her creations are inspired by a unique imaginary world and driven by an "inner necessity" as Kandinsky named it. She tames her inner images and their incongruous assemblage by collecting everything she can find: glass beads, pieces of fabric, splinters of mirrors, seashells, feathers of sea birds and peacocks, plastic miniatures "made in China", rocks, bolts ... all these traces of dreams or nightmares are scrapped and then metamorphosed by a meticulous work involving painting, inlays, patina that gives them a new life they hadn't even dreamed of.

The new series "Galéjades" is placed under the sign of shock and awa, with works of Marie-Pierre Fontaine and of the Nancy School, and more particularly those of its founder and inspiration, Emile Gallé. The Galéjades illustrate Marie-Pierre Fontaine's capacity to operate this transposition of various Art Nouveau aesthetic principles into her own approach without altering anything in her view of a playful decorative work; this view has animated all her series and is based on a very particular imaginary world, evoking sometimes the world of Lewis Carrol's Alice.