Do they mean renaissance or chaos, these fruits of the imagination and
of science that are constantly being added to our reality and the millions
of elements of information that bombard our brain cells? A fabulous reunion
with ancient times, fulfilling all our fears? Mythological fantasy? Marvel?
Danger? Marian Fountain adds her sculptor’s gesture to this infinite ballad
of millennial possibilities and alienations, and her hybrid creations
(Rabbit, Fish,
Coronation Chicken)
stand out as signs or even warnings of time passing – alive – future,
past and present.
Today, genetics,
nanotechnology, robotics and the virtual world can create marvels, geniuses,
phenomena and monsters. These sciences play with our lives, announce irremediable
metamorphoses, and launch unpredictable adventures like the flight of
the soul bird in the cosmos. They re-awaken us to the precariousness of
all reality and life forms, accelerate the incessant movement of life
and of impermanence, that beneficent state that allows the Buddhist to
attain wisdom and enlightenment in the face of death, the artist to reflect
and create, and the researcher to perfect new drugs.
The work of Marian
Fountain travels from antiquity to the future. From the simple glow of
bronze and her ideas, she makes it possible to unite these monsters, the
early merging of our memories and hopes, the incommensurable coupling
of the mortal and the divine, of reality and dream. "With bronze, I take
a thread and cast it into the future," she says. In more ways than one,
the forms she creates are concrete Utopias with the fascinating ability
to whisper the past and the future. Their troubling aura acts as spirits
marking a time from which they seem however liberated.
Fabulous creatures.
In their multitude they speak about life, about us, about time
– indescribable space, invincible time, in which humans are Gods, heroes.
And also in which no life form is unmutable. Chromosomes,
Chrysalids, eclipses, clones, springs, tribes, cells, all carry the
reassuring, essential humility of the labourer who lives from the soil;
the proud and fertile extravagance of a sage who would live from the ether;
the feather lightness of the angel who flies free in the heavens, next
to the lightning and the sun, source of the first fire, of the speed and
insignificance of the time which is given to us and which is counted.
And like the Three Graces who
captivate and who also hold the invisible thread of time – in their Chinese,
Neoclassic and Victorian versions – these forms and bronzes speak to us
also of the identifying marks of our own life experiences.
This brings us back to Marian, to her sense of humour, her fantasies, her emotions, and leads us on towards that other image, Alice in Wonderland. Between the elemental pain of birth and the wonder of life, offerings and omens, Polynesian shields and the ships that carried her ancestors towards New Zealand (Ecstasy Boat is particularly compact, eloquent and inspiring), the sculptor tells the life force – with commitment, obstinacy and resistance – that she has appropriated by crossing the world herself, taking care never to forget – nor to efface or dissolve – the faraway land of her birth. For this exhibition the artist and her sculptures have made an exceptional voyage in the dawn of the third millennium. It is an awakening as precious as fire. Vivat.
Alexis Campion
My thanks to Air New Zealand for their generous aid in transporting myself and my sculptures between Paris and Auckland.
Marian Fountain