Conversation with Alberta Pane

I thought of my encounter with Marie Denis and her work Memento Mori, although I could tell countless stories that have moved me and continue to shape my everyday life thanks to all the artists represented by the gallery who fill my days with their art and unique worlds.
My encounter with Marie Denis and her work happened in 2009, and it holds special significance for me because it coincides with the early years of my career as a gallerist in Paris. I hosted Marie Denis’ first solo exhibition in my gallery space, which at the time was located on rue Saint-Claude in the Marais.

I met Marie Denis thanks to a mutual friend of ours, the curator Adrien Pasternak, who invited me to the Manufacture de Sèvres, the renowned French institution, where Marie was performing a piece involving pollen during which she wore some unforgettable red tights.
Right after the performance, she came up to me and asked for a cigarette, which I didn’t have. That was my very first encounter with both the work and with Marie Denis. I immediately realized she was an absolutely extraordinary and unconventional person, with a strong personality. A few days later, I visited her studio and truly entered her universe.

I remember perfectly the deep emotion that Marie Denis’ work Memento Mori stirred in me, a vegetal mask made from an evergreen plant, trapped between two panes of glass. The piece was created to defy the relentless passing of time, while simultaneously evoking the inevitability and fragility of the human condition. A botanical vanitas. A beautiful, powerful artwork, yet full of hope, one I instantly fell in love with. That moment marked the beginning of my journey with Marie Denis.
Needless to say, the piece feels more contemporary than ever today. The contemporary art world once driven by a seemingly unstoppable frenzy of travel and movement caused by the globalization of art now finds itself at a standstill, forced to confront a virus. A weighty warning that reminds us of our fragile condition, the value of essential things, and the role art can play in our lives as time passes.

Marie Denis, a French artist born in 1972 in Ardèche, is a fairy of vegetal material, but not only that. She has always been interested in experimentation, metamorphosis, and the reworking of the natural world, as well as in the potential that metallic materials and new techniques can bring to her work. The artist reinterprets and poetizes nature, sometimes polished, mineralized, scanned, assembled, or woven. Marie Denis’s vegetal world, made existential, finds new life through its interaction with the space that hosts it and with the viewer who experiences it.

I would like to conclude with some words from the artist:

“As a child, I used to create window displays in my dear grandmother’s lingerie shop and run through the countryside. Since then, I have never stopped bringing nature into spaces to reinvent it and give life to works that open up to the sensitivity of the viewer. For more than twenty years, I have pursued this research into the vegetal world, through experimentation and metamorphosis, in which I test formats and materials. My work takes photographic, printed, sculptural forms, mineralized by patinas, or captured between two panes of glass: I continuously filter and revisit the techniques that fertilize my forms. Through these explorations, my subjective viewpoint on nature manifests itself, making matter and materials poetic. My forms are dark, under the sign of Eros and Thanatos. I try to repair “the impermanent” that slips through the fingers like sand. Nature is my living material for research and creation. The artist is a “seismograph,” capturing and transforming whatever the era has produced without distinction. They filter and distinguish. They are an acrobat of revendication in the sense of nomadism of thought and forms. Beyond their own life, the artist “outside of themselves” emits forms that civilize our life.” – Marie Denis.