Two years ago, I was finishing my presentation quoting the « obscure clearness that falls from the stars » that our guest Sylvie Landois-Maynard had illustrated by privileging the shades of black and grey, maybe inspired by the blacks and light of Pierre Soulages and placing her work of the moment in the non-figurative.
Five years ago, SLM presented us a figurative set of artworks through representations of Leonard da Vinci, Shakespeare, Carmen character, with a maelstrom of violent colors.
This year, Sylvie Landois-Maynard composes in the two genres. With the less large formats, we recognize abstract works, well… abstract until each one of us finds a personal significance in them: books in a library, a small street between two walls, passages under vaults, ending on a work significantly different from the others, an interlace of curves and varied thickness of paint, a network of something, tunnels for the Boeotian I am, but for the artist, after translation into French, it is a new metropolitan.
And then… Then SLM as usual composes and shows large formats which, as she says it herself, are perfectly suited to Salle Aquitaine. She composes on a topic which is colossal by itself: the big city. New York, Dublin, London are revisited by the artist, a process which always implies a certain number of upheavals, as our epoch amply experiments them.
The particularity of these works, beyond the creative process which implies a work on canvas set horizontally, consists in using acrylic as if it were watercolor, which gives this mildness to each work.
New-York, Dublin, London, and with your personal imagination, Sylvie Landois-Maynard invites you to travel round the world without leaving the Salle Aquitaine.
Hervé Laurent - President of GEM
