Bérénice Mayaux: Twister

Born in 1981, Bérénice Mayaux is a painter and a 2005 graduate in design from the École des Beaux-Arts in Reims. She initially juggled between design, art and floral design before finally devoting herself to painting. Drawing on all these influences, she creates deep chromatic and geometric compositions with multiple vanishing lines and delicate, subtle, airy gradations, sometimes framed by multiple airbrushed backgrounds.

Between Abstraction, Post-Futurism, Pop Art, and Op' Art, her outlines render speed, dynamism, and an impression of multipolar movement. The volumes are reminiscent of familiar contemporary design objects or potential architectural spaces. Skilfully orchestrated by light, colours become almost organic, vibrant, alive. They scream, move, and take on a life of their own.

"Twister" - the title of the exhibition is in English - means both "tornado" and "a crook", but also evokes a floor game played with coloured tiles on which participants place a foot or a hand and find their bodies all intermeshed with each other. It refers to a twist in a screenplay or in a detective story. It can be a kitschy green and white British ice cream that twists and turns, like the ones you see on posters or in Martin Parr's photographs, or along the coastline of Ramsgate, where the Laurent Delaye Gallery, which represents the artist, is located.

Bérénice Mayaux's paintings love twists and contortions. Those presented at L'Atelier des Vertus are composed of related elements that have been recombined, stretched and turned inside out. The painting 'Twisties', for its part, evokes the very symptom that gymnasts sometimes suffer from - a loss of balance, more precisely a loss of reference points in space. Bérénice Mayaux is a former gymnast, and it is, of course, this disorientation which she's looking for, and with it a sensation of intoxication.

Text(translated from French) by Katia Feltrin, Curator, Atelier des Vertus, Paris.