Marie Zolamian

The recumbents
Jean-Michel Botquin

Marie Zolamian initiated this series on loose canvas, stretched on the wall like a skin, after seeing the film Departures by Yojiro Takita, a work that draws the viewer into the little known world of Japanese funeral rites, through the journey of Daigo, a former cellist who became mortician despite himself. Unemployed, he responds to a job ad «help to leave», believing it to be a travel agent.
These small paintings are all intimate and sensitive counterpoints: Marie Zolamian paints recumbents in familiar interiors, alone, sometimes watched over by a woman, rooms with well kept secrets, with sets reduced to the essential, a carpet, a furniture, a portrait of a matriarchal grandmother. All these girls wear communicants cloths or marriage dresses, celebrations cloths, rites of passing through, they seem dormant, but are they, in a floating world, an image of any passage and rituals that accompany them, from presence to absence. The ancient «Nekuia» from the eleventh song of the Odyssey is, as we know, an invocation to the dead. And the sense of creative journey concludes Michel Guérin, is set to release life of constant grip and stealthy of death, to return to the things and beings with this expanded view of the artist as the Japanese novelist Kawabata has appointed the ultimate gaze.