Praz-Delavallade

Maude Maris 
Seer and Seen


18 NOVEMBER 2023 – 6 JANUARY 2024

The animals who float through the dreamy atmospheres of Maude Maris’s new paintings are mainly ones she knows from around her studio in Normandy: a cat, a bat, and a snail are among them. Each seems endowed with a magic whose properties we can’t know, as if at the center of a creation myth just unfolding. The cat, viewed from above, rests on a blanket of night sky, stars arrayed before it like playthings. The bat hangs before a brushy field of blue, joined only by a disc of moon. And the snail glides through an overcast sky, the barest suggestion of land beneath. Our vantage on each of the animals disorients; we may not be their intended audience.