The first thing to do is to find a fixed position. The onlooker must have cause to enter, to penetrate into the world of Marie-Anita Gaube. However, a patient quest is required in order to achieve an analytical review, to apply a knowledgeable eye. The images which are presented before us do not make it easy. We must approach them along crisscrossing paths. They do not surrender to, as much as they stride across, the observant eye. The eye explores, its routine perturbed.

What does one see ? What is it at stake in this painting referred to elsewhere as « hybrid » ? What does one really see ? By Marie-Anita Gaube's own admission, the titles speak to us in riddles.

The image resists a single interpretation. Should one, in order to grasp the mystery, undertake a comparison of the different canvasses in order to establish an ultimate « difference » amidst the differences, something which would unravel the workings of a definitive painting style, give away a glimpse of the broad outlines of a particular style, a world ? And yet this would go against the grain of the disposition to take vis-à-vis the paintings of Marie-Anita Gaube. Such a disposition would suffer the misfortune of the painting being reduced to a mystery frozen in a single word, when it is really intrinsically unsettled, in motion, yet to arrive. The mystery is essentially not quite born, still in the making.

There is never one single scene portrayed, but a crowd of them, a plethora of actions and references in time, the different facets of a singular narrative from which logic has fled. It is, as Marie-Anita Gaube puts it, « the theatre of the canvas », something « out of time » which witnesses the comings and goings of the figures.
The tableau is sprinkled with ghosts, where individuals appear and disappear. It thus gives the impression that a complex mental construct as a « grand image »* has preceded the canvas. In the beginning, therefore, was an idea.

Nevertheless, what is the nature of the mental construct implied ? Is it elements of a landscape ?
Or is it there to outline the space of the painting to come ?

L'antichambre, here, is a word which echoes throughout my encounter with Marie-Anita Gaube : This idea of an undetermined flowing space, not frozen, inhabited by characters from nowhere. Hence, this « grand image »¹ which precedes the act itself of painting is revealed to us only through cursory glimpses. We can see only certain faces, fragments which show the impossibility of seizing the totality of the mental space.
One could conceive the « grand image »* as a free-standing sculpture which does not give itself away other than from one angle at a time. There is an admission of the paintings' narrative limits set by its figurative constraints, which evokes something unseen, an « otherness » drawing upon a deeper mystery.

It is truly a painting of « movement », a flow, an image which anticipates and precedes the scene. The characters, their backs turned to the onlooker, perhaps just on the verge of turning away, are set towards an asserted identity, while one remains unaware if this has been accomplished or still to be. The only certitude : The transitional state, the task to be accomplished.

Border handles the themes of migration, uprooting.
The landscape is subjected to a similar lack of definition. It is a Paysage poreux (a « porous landscape »), a Poursuite in the « pursuit » of a reliable spatial quality. The gouache and graphite pencil drawings exist between two temporal states: A monochrome suspended in time as in a memory retrieved, in contrast with a more present, more conceivable vision, bursting forth with colour.

The resulting impression of the painting is of something destined for the creation of « a place » which does not really exist. The brush-work of characters in a pattern, as if borrowed from classical painting, has been diverted away from its narrative role. The perspective which governed the arrangement of figures, according to their significance in a painting, has now become a tool of the unreal, one of the deconstruction of the topos. But this diversion is not meant to be derisory or to ridicule, it pertains more to the process of deconstruction.

Marie-Anita Gaube's painting induces one to see beyond the frame set by the image, to open up a path to imagination, to raise oneself beyond the one-dimensional surface colours. She says, « The colour is there to stir up a disturbance. It has been applied as if to contradict. It sets it apart ». There is a discrepancy between colour and reality; it is a lever leaning the sight towards an opening into the picture.

It is a painting of the point of access, an approach, a painting of the waiting room, whose finality is not fixed ; it is still in motion. One looks upon the painting of Marie-Anita Gaube as one would retain the memory of a cinema sequence. It is an invitation to enter an area to be, one of anticipation.