Could the title under which Marie-Anita Gaube groups together her last paintings have been more explicit? Out of place – that which has been moved, literally and guratively – to indicate the astonishing mobility that is part of her paintings. She is already well-known for her games of juxtaposition, the superposition of elements and disparate plans that already used to encourage a certain circulation between objects and places reunited on canvas. Here she succeeds in making this geography even more complex, in particular by accentuating the discrepancies in scale in her landscapes. Exaggerating the differences between the fore and backgrounds in order to better dig vertiginous rising perspectives : tiny profiles of birds sailing out at sea on frail and weak barges, concise outlines, sketched in a few translucent strokes, miniature characters, going about we don't know what under cover of the trees ; and this tiny cabin squeezed onto the horizon of the body of water, huddled in front of a grove of thorough vegetation that we imagine to be rich despite the distance. These playlets, which are almost out of range, make us continuously adapt our vision, or better still, make us come closer – and they invite us to a paradoxically intimate reading, as close as possible to these considerably large sized paintings.
Marie-Anita Gaube depicts distant lands abound with a mass of tiny details. And as with other Flemish Primitives, many strange activities take place there – in unique contortions, the characters are abruptly catapulted overboard, or they brandish flares to inspect the depths. In Pluton they bathe, naked, taking on incongruous, grotesque positions which are sometimes reminiscent of the grotesque figures by an artist like Hieronymus Bosch. With his head underwater, a man is trying to get his balance, one leg half folded, revealing his genitals ; and this completely crazy pose summarizes the inappropriate nature of the exhibition's title. Nearby, another character, standing with his back to us, is covering his shoulders with a towel. This time the gesture is disarmingly daily. With Marie-Antia Gaube the body is often clumsy, betraying the abandon which only happens in the most ordinary situations. Finally, a body is totally domestic, even though, conversely, it is part of an improbable wilderness. So much so, in fact, that it willingly loses some of its corporality. It is another constant in the way work evolves: broken up, smaller and becoming marginal in these oversized environments, here the gure is often close to decay – like this individual taking an unsteady step in Hidden Space, with the few highlights and weak links used to draw him almost ready to collapse into a pile of shapeless pictorial matter. Using transparency, overlapping, the figure sometimes even changes enough to become inextricably intertwined with the depths. Liquefied, scattered, the body that Marie-Anita Gaube delivers ends up by no longer existing. Freed of the limits of its initial phenomenality, it brings this utopic dimension attributed to it by Foucault : “Itis the ground zero of the world” ¹, this absolute place, simultaneously here and elsewhere, from which point “[...] I dream, I speak, I move forward, I imagine.” ²
And after all Marie-Antia Gaube's painting is always shown in this way, by the contrasting of antithetical concepts. Furthermore this is why she fragments, unlevels the pictorial space, in order to create unpredictable passages between these radically opposed places that she likes to introduce. In this way, everything is linked and yet everything is in contradiction : the foregrounds at the front, with solid surfaces – the jetty, the canoe's bow, slats of wooden flooring which is slightly dipped in order to emphasize the alignments – that project towards the unfathomable expanses of water which seem to bathe everything. Within, without, inextricably entangled. Everything in this painting is represented, contested, inverted all at once. For example, water keeps changing state – it runs down a waterfall, is raised into monumental icebergs, is scattered as u y snow akes. With Eldorado we don't seem to know anymore : one character wanders across the lagoon as he would across an ice floe, while another dives into it. Unless the horizontal line that radically splits the painting in two actually indicates the shift of mirror symmetry with this other blue beach, these polar skies in which broken ice seems to float.
This potential for reversibility is the main means used by Marie-Anita Gaube to find a way around the logical form that image and reality must have in common. In this way she blurs what would otherwise be a representation. Even more, she is not content with organising an improbable closeness of things, but she also seeks to make the site itself impossible for these things to come close together. She does everything so that we intentionally lose the place where the painting unfolds ; everything to stop it happening, in a radically plural spatiality which is reminiscent of these other spaces, that Foucault called heterotopy – these locations where, he says, “[...] the world feels less like a great life that will develop through time than like a network that links points and intertwines its web.” ³