Marie Surprenant

She paints with her nails and fingers, caressing and scratching the paper made of stone dust, heavy paper that resists tearing from a woman who carries a memory where humans were connected with the primitive, animal world. Her painting is the invocation of this life on the walls of caves. The difference is that instead of recreating the stylized figures admired in this prehistoric art, she paints on the boundary of abstraction that precedes any representation. With Marie Surprenant, painting does not colour a drawn scene; on the contrary, it is from the abstract origins of painting that she makes figures and the outline of a story among them appear. Perhaps the force of attraction of these origins of painting was too strong, or perhaps something inside her led her to pull away from the constraint of representation that orders dreams, or perhaps the boundary on which she painted compelled her to nomadism that prevented herself from finding her place; the fact remains that her paintings then became increasingly abstract, with a beauty that did not prevent me from feeling I’d lost her. But there is so much expectation in her painting that the least we can do is wait for her to return.

  Patrick Cady