Smoke on the water, 2023

Maylis Bourdet  

“A painting in the colors of dreams":

Landscapes bathed in fog, inhabited by unknown birds, fugitive dragonflies, cherry trees frozen by winter. Fantasy Japan, endless roads of Indiana, lined with telegraph poles and traveled by the ghosts of Fargo. Milky perspectives of uncertain lands: Caribbean, Siam or Madras de Deus. Mysterious lands with names forgotten or mistreated by history, lands of illusions and mirages. The list could go on...

If Maylis hides her compasses, gears or nautical charts in her paintings, it is perhaps to help us find our routes. The countries she shows us resemble those of Jules Verne or Stevenson, impossible to reach because they are at the outer borders of our imagination. We think we are going through them but we are only dreaming about them.

Secret words of Zen calligraphy, antique patinas, subtle glazes of the old walls of Tuscany: Maylis Bourdet's composite images are inspired by journeys that are sometimes feverish, sometimes still...

The air is present there, it never stops vibrating, charged with dust or electricity. Nothing moves here, but everything is transformed: a pond in Vendôme looks like a lake in Kyoto; a high-altitude path in the Pyrenees is mistaken for the windy stairs of Minas Morgul and the Malecon of Havana looks like the North Sea on a January afternoon.

The vapors and mists that bathe his canvases are not static, they slide imperceptibly, just at the corner of the eye, at the limits of our ability to see.

Michel Moatti