Maïlys Seydoux: Open-work

To let a secret presence spring up to reveal its true nature – elusive yet persistent; to depict intimacy, like the cosmos, through broken mirrors and to invite us, through these multicolored images, to grasp an unsuspected, open-work reality…
The point here is not to reach for the moon but to catch its beams. The density of empty volumes must be matched with the fullness of shapes in order to indent representation, to tone down interpretation, and to let astonishment prevail.

Diffracting figures, subliming the fragments and, in the process, making the in-between tangible… From her studio's window, Maïlys Seydoux points at observation with both a gun and a question mark. When daylight fades out, she makes the outside world bounce back inside and grasps it with a game of hand mirrors, thus catching a glimpse of the shadows of torn blinds or drawn curtains. Thus selected, recomposed and celebrated, the city's reflection becomes a muted-colored field. And these "floating worlds" inspire enigmatic and flamboyant images. Their fragments become sparks. Meaning dissolves as troubling images appear.

Initially enclosed by the modernist architecture of the studio's windows and the opposing building, on the canvas space becomes a fluid, woven and glimmering allegory of our own inability to simply and wholly embrace what surrounds us, what makes us. "What you see is as strange as what you are," says the painter, who often paints herself with her head cut off by the painting's frame or in a biblically oval frame reminiscent of a plate used for a sacrifice.

Maïlys Seydoux does not speak much and prefers not to be quoted; instead, she refers her interlocutors to the authors she loves: George Perec on landscape; Gilles Deleuze on joy, and Marcel Proust's Bergotte – the character who stared intensely at "a little section of yellow wall" before dying – on sadness. She also quotes Jorge Luis Borges and his mention in El Hacedor of a giant broken mirror "like a spider's web in an uncertain world". Vertigo and illumination – Maïlys Seydoux paints shoes on a window ledge one night, and the next morning, a light in the window of new neighbors opposite her studio. This is how she makes us love what eludes us.

Maïlys Seydoux does not define subjects. She interrogates the gaze. Her pots and brushes were the first alibis in that quest, followed by her own face in the mirror and then the world as it is reflected in her studio's window. Each of these series constitutes a facet of the same meditation on what transpires surreptitiously if one looks long and hard enough.

During the two-year refurbishment of the hotel facing her studio, Maïlys Seydoux chose to focus on the movements of ill-adjusted tarpaulins floating unexpectedly in the wind. She has turned the construction site into a new, enchanted kingdom. By using chance and boredom as allies, she does not, yet again, so much depict as transfigure. A great escape.

FRANÇOISE MONNIN, Paris, September 2017
Translation Élise Trogrlic