BREST.- As an Artist in Residence, a role created and supported by Passerelle and Documents d’artistes Bretagne, Marie Boyer (1997) is exhibiting a series of new works she has produced at Passerelle. She is a graduate of the Quimper campus of the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne (the European Academy of Art in Brittany) and here has developed an astonishing, joyous garden where painting interplays with botany and with the Japanese manga aesthetic.

“There are flowers everywhere for anyone who cares to look” declared Henri Matisse. This cheesy, rather kitsch quotation might be seen on a box of chocolates or on a sign outside a garden centre, yet it leads to much deeper reflections than might first be apparent, on the role of art and the presence of joy in our lives. That sentence uttered by such a famous painter explains much of the art of Marie Boyer. She sees flowers as «living beings intended to be painted», as a sort of ideal and perfect motif. Her love of flora partly derives from her family, of whom one side originated on the island of Reunion where plants abound in profusion, and partly from one of her grandfathers on the other side who was passionate about floral composition. He would document flowers by photographing them and carefully classifying them in files which the artist has studied closely.

Marie Boyer is keenly Interested In the history of painting, and is fully aware that flowers are a subject with a particular iconography which have been widely represented by her peers. Understanding the history of art helps her understand her own practice as an artist. She observes the Renaissance painters, is passionate about Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) and Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) while also appreciating more modern and contemporary works from Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) - a lone American painter, indefinable, who fascinates her both for her art and for her life choices - to the duo of Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille (1974) who plumb the anonymous depths of the Internet. Marie Boyer is interested in what differentiates ‘good painting’ from just daubing paint: is it a matter of technique, positioning or status? She makes herself change style regularly, sometimes between each painting, sometimes after a series; it’s like a need providing sustenance for her work. At Passerelle, she chooses to transpose the flatness of the canvas into space, transforming traditional painting into astonishing sculptures. The rooms of the exhibition become an exuberant garden. The flowers are like characters onto whom the public can project their own desires, hopes and experiences. When Marie Boyer represents bodies, these play a supporting role to the plant motifs. Some of the flowers shown reference fragments from anime of the Japanese manga culture such as Sailor Moon and Cat’s Eyes. Marie Boyer recently explained that «painting is joyous magic that allows you to find infinite ways of representing the world.» This statement is as cheesy yet serious as that of Matisse and reveals the artist’s view that painting is above all a matter of pleasure!