THE BOOK

“The air, it’s first the outdoors air, the open air, the good air, the air of small birds, of space and sky. We find it in profusion in the paintings of Marie Laurence. We don’t always think about noticing it because other impressions prevail, but it is precisely this discrete presence that conditions all the rest. It is a good thing to underline it, because the imponderable transparency of the air, as well as the habit we have to breathe it without paying attention, could trick the painter in believing that it’s useless to paint it. (…) Look at The Meadow in Aubrac, at Summer in Saint-Basile, at The Farm in Auvergne, the air is not an invisible world, an absence of substance, a transparency more or less pure but without density, a negligible element ignored by the composition; on the contrary, it is palpable, dense, it takes its full part in those landscapes of hills, trees, vales, constructions and the sky of which it is an initiation. Thus, between our eye and the horizon line, there is more than the space whose perspective is enough to give us an illusion, more than the depth where the light sinks, more than the splendid beauty of nature, there is this mass of translucent air, elastic and compact, of which the painting is filled with. We could, it may seem, bite in it like in a fruit. In the electric sense of the term, this air is conductive: it puts our gaze in contact which each ground of the painting till the far-off distance, hence this impression of a more complete possession. Is it the reason why some landscapes invite us, by mimicry, to breathe more widely, more deeply? To experience, through a phenomenon of Baudelaire-like correspondences, sensations other than just visual? For, and this is precisely where resides the artist’s strength like the mark of her attentive and loose sensibility, this air has a temperature: it is cool, cold, torrid, warm; it has a tactile quality: it is humid, vaporous, dry, prickly, soft, dusty, crystalline; and it has a power: stimulating, appeasing, fortifying, intoxicating. And it is this air that gives her painting its first virtue, the most useful, fertile and solar one: health.”