Text by Marc Desgrandchamps, 2014
Written for Dérives's catalogue exhibition, at Progress Gallery from 15 november to 20 december 2014,
with the support from the Centre national des arts plastiques.

I first saw Marie-Anita Gaube's paintings two years ago. She was a student at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and was working on a large format painting that I was only to see finished in a  photograph and which has since been stolen.
The painting depicted a world of human and animal figures and plants of varying sizes, in a setting featuring a river flowing through meadows: a landscape whose horizon was delimited by a chain of mountains worthy of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour.
I was intrigued by this painting, whose whimsical atmosphere reminded me of the playful spontaneity of English Pop Art, especially early David Hockney.
Seeing her subsequent work has only made me more deeply intrigued.
This feeling is linked to the mysterious arrangements that give structure to the compositions, accompanied by titles that are no less enigmatic. It is hard to make out a subject. It seems that these paintings are like the life—or rather the lives—we lead, made up of instants whose meaning only becomes clear to us later, when the actions or projects that motivated us and blinded us have vanished. The fresh, sometimes acid colours contribute to this state of things, along with a representational freedom that seems to combine fragments of dreams and figures from reality. A t-shirt with a target on it becomes the central feature of a moonlit, dreamlike scene. Two headless bodies, one of which could be from a painting by Francis Bacon, face each other. A head in the form of a mask lies on the grass, and all is bathed in moonlight. The title of the work envisions dialogue, even if this dialogue remains wordless to us. It might be a peaceful nightmare, the harmony of certain colour shades and a few warmly lit cold colours creating a sense of the ambiguous sweetness of this world.
Paradoxically enough, the apparent spontaneity of certain paintings is the result of a long process of adjustment and superimposition. The colours are not laid down without remorse : they are contradicted by other hues that qualify what a distracted eye might see as mere expanses of solid colour. Like the red that Daniel Arasse glimpsed under Matisse's blue, it might be the source of visual pleasure where painting, beyond onesided determination, materialises in the subtlety of a colour scheme built up in successive stages. It's the last brushstroke that matters, but it's amplified by everything that came before.
The substance of the paint is not uniform ; instead we see varying thicknesses, as in Métamorphose, a work whose title seems to refer both to what is happening to the figures and to the way they are depicted on the canvas. Métamorphose also reminds me of a painting by Martial Raysse entitled Les Deux Poètes in which seated two figures face the viewer. The same frontality is at work in Maria-Anita Gaube's painting, but in her work the figures remain uncertain, and only a few precise details—hands or a shoe— elliptically identify their presence. There's also a kind of encryption of the scene, seen as a fact of painting rather than the encryption of a representation that depends on a story that must be discovered.
And yet the viewer can be tempted to undertake an interpretative exercise, prompted by recognisable elements borrowed from other realities scattered across the paintings. The red chevrons in Diagnostique de la Mélancolie recall Frank Stella's early work, and less obviously, the space located immediately above this reminiscence is somewhat evocative of Brice Marden's fluid work of the last thirty years. Linking Stella—whose name also means star—, the chevrons, and the astronaut standing to the left of them might seem a bold move, even if it reflects the fact that Marie-Anita Gaube's compositions can be seen as rebuses, or more fundamentally as repositories of clues based on which a meaning can be imagined and even reconstituted. The intrusion of emblematic elements from abstract art akin to minimalism shows that the artist's visual culture allows her to work from various sources that she recombines as a painter, assimilating them into the world of her canvases. Here we have all the key elements of an approach which, beyond the artist's current successes, promise a broad-ranging experimental territory for the future.