ARTHUR MARIE

Struggle for Pleasure

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May 6 - June 4, 2022

Opening Friday, May 6     18 - 20h

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The works of Arthur Marie, small and strict, furtive and fetish, are deeply rooted in the now through the past. Their old master varnished surfaces speak to that which society stores in its dusty museums and awakens in the darkness of film and video games and the corporate product of the corner store. Five centuries ago the Vanitas slipped the beautiful past the moral majority, whose equivalent now demands paintings of perceived lived experience alone. The rotting in those Dutch paintings links here to reminders of passing time, memories and our limited corporality. Stripped of color and saturation, they are not excuses for the beautiful, but institutional depictions of the interior and here. Loneliness and Sisyphus, sometimes cousins, become mirrored portraits. Closely cropped, all appear within spaces straddling public and private. Figurative, but the figure gone, coming or never showed up. This is a narrative of setting alone. With the Vanitas each object spoke to the experience of life in relation to others, here the objects are clearly coded for the creator and yet open to decipher for all. Specific pies, equipment, spilled seed - universal and personal in a world so stripped by the digital and the daily runaround and recent years of canceled planning. Has the voyeuristic ever been so sexless? In these private moments captured in labored time beauty materializes in alienated dreams.