All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal

A corps perdu
Vanessa Desclaux

Marie Zolamian has made a series of four paintings that reproduce in a very detailed manner the décor of three bedrooms of the castle of Châteauneuf. In these decors, themselves historical reconstitutions of the castle’s interiors, Zolamian inserts the presence of figures lying down on the beds. These figures are part of an ongoing research, begun by the artist in 2010, giving birth to a first series of small paintings, that have the particularity to use fragments of canvas in raw linen, prepared with skin glue, which gives them irregular edges. This form gives to the paintings the status of an object that recalls the intimate and contemplative relation with the religious icon.
Zolamian’s bedrooms appear as places of isolation, outside of any specific time or place. The canvases draw the limit of fragments of space where the characters are imprisoned in the secret of sleep, or death. The gaze moves from one painting to another following a sort of ritual, passing from one story to the next, one physical or psychological state to another, with a feeling of wander coupled with an uncanny familiarity.