Marie-Anita Gaube paints worlds that have all the instability of fantastic tales, fleeting memories or other-worldly obsessions. By turns lyrical and hallucinatory, her paintings are the result of interwoven references and suggestions collected during daily searches for new images. They are composed according to a principle akin to surrealist collage or film editing.
Constructed via a process of framing and unframing that is both visual and narrative, her works are palimpsests, rebuses made up of spatial and temporal fragments embedded within one another. This process of embedding makes the images into epiphanies, constellations where time is crystallised into pictures: “Like a double door or the wings of a butterfly, the act of apparition is a perpetually repeated movement of closing and opening, of swinging out and back”.¹
But they are also capricci of modern ruins. The real and the fantastic, erudite intertextuality and flights of the imagination combine along an axis that leads from Canaletto's impossible vedute to Goya's disturbing allegories.
The figures that underpin the syntax of Gaube's work are somewhat evocative of major painters of fantastic imagery such as Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Doig, Odilon Redon and James Ensor.
On the canvas, her sometimes shy and clumsy figures come together in a precarious world, a theatre whose paper sky might tear asunder at any moment, as in Pirandello's The Late Mathias Pascal. The atmosphere is sometimes that of a Beckett-like huis clos, sometimes that of luxuriant forests where all is luxe, calme et volupté : diaphanous settings for narratives made up of visual clues and dreamscapes imbricated within an intermediate, enigmatic space.

In Marie-Anita Gaube's most recent works, echoing the squares in de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, the human figure often signals absence or virtuality : pushed out onto the margins, conjured up by details, or subliminally evoked, man inhabits the space of the canvas like the memory of a presence that will shortly become anachronistic or which belongs to the future : a figure of suspense or expectation arising from a desire for something to happen.
At once a stage, a setting and a landscape, the tense space that remains becomes a wounded background ; the objects that dwell there are idols reminiscent of Francis Bacon, while disparate perspectives, scales and motifs stand as invitations to pass through the looking-glass.
These scenes are constructed in counterpoint, shifting between different depths and levels of transparency, intricate pigmentary details and bare surfaces, figurative references and reflexive gestures involving both material and medium, in a hand-to-hand struggle between the painter and the canvas. The painterly form is built up by and in colour, using an anti-naturalistic palette rooted both in expressionist and Fauvist tradition and in contemporary techno-artificial imagery.

The resulting paintings evoke instants where reality meets and slips inside fantasy, on the same ambiguous threshold that has characterised the timeless fascination of fantastic realism from the early 20th century to the present.
Although rooted in classic painterly tradition, Marie-Anita Gaube's works establish a network of enmeshed temporalities where the past short-circuits the present on the naturally dystopian plane of the imagination.
A tiny detail—a man wearing a gas mask, a veil of chemical colours—might suggest scenarios typical of contemporary science fiction. A simple shift in perspective might turn a funfair into a hellish banquet, comedy into tragedy, man and his world into a carnival of grotesque masks or a psychedelic forest of confusing and confused symbols.
At the heart of these ambiguous interwoven tableaux, where each image suggests, evokes and conceals its own flipside, are borrowed rituals, Ubuesque mythologies made up of drifting fragments, “quotes without quotation marks”, dysfunctional signs, and silent cracks where webs of discourse are spun.
In Marie-Anita Gaube's capricious paintings, the dream becomes a narrative chronotope involving the time and space of every image that reveals itself and every action that unfolds. As Queneau wrote in his introduction to Fleurs Bleues, quoting Plato, it is “ôvap àvxi ôveipaxoç” : a dream for a dream.