keeping in touch — colinemarotta

Keeping in touch

november 2021
Brigade, Copenhagen

Life is busy and a constant stream of one event after the other, making it hard to meet all ends, clutching on to existence rather than gripping it with agency and purpose. But not in the paintings by Coline Marotta, which offers a much-needed counterpoint to the strife of life.

Setting her motifs within confined spaces, be it exterior or domestic, Marotta conveys moments of not only introspection but also acceptance – that moment where we let go and fall into harmonic coexistence with our surroundings. Regardless of whether it is trying to fit inside a crooked kitchen, arms encircling a pasta dish or a lover, or just fitting into a bed, everyone finds an enviable moment of peace, or rather a moment of non-emergency.

It’s not a moment of conquest or overcoming, but it’s a moment of freedom, including the right to waver and to doubt.

The paintings exists as frames within frames, windows or pictures, narrations within the narration. This layering offers a mean of escape in the form of implied boredom as much as the birth of imagination – it’s a moment of patience, a moment when we are ready for something to happen, moments we are ready to be lost in. Walter Benjamin wrote that to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And in these paintings where outer landscapes meets inner ones, the fusion between nature and people, between planes of existence starts shining through. Each painting seems to be placed between dream and reality, not exactly belonging to a factual moment but still giving clues of familiar spaces that we can all recognise.

With a palette partly composed of dark night blues, celestial yellows, limey greens, blushy reds, the emotional sentiments are amplified. The limit between the inside and the outside becomes intensified and distorted, leaving no space flattened or unattended. The brush strokes create the homely environment and protective, almost featherlike layer, that allow the characters to adjust their body shapes and directions into their fluid positions.

Symbols of hope, hope for better days, for care, love and feeling home sprout up in the paintings. Books, objects of desire as well as dried flowers, perhaps from a lover, hang from the ceiling. These are not moments impressed with the phenomenal, but instead in love with beauty and magic of the banal - “réconfort” read as re-comfort.

There is a feeling of inaction in the works but not the kind linked to boredom, rather moments of soft acceptance of being in one’s state, no matter which it is. That moment of muted clarity where creativity happens, where being and time combine and stretch into the far-off horizon. Keeping us in touch with ourselves.