Gilles Marrey

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Marrey started by approaching these new themes through street scenes at dusk, views of railway stations and Parisian embankments. These are places of passage and transit, rather empty, with a mixture of the near and the far - only just places, but still familiar and fit to live in. He then took the plunge in choosing what are truly non-places, as they have been known since Marc Augé : ring raods, the halls and waiting rooms in airports, the city viewed from the upper stories of a hotel, all those spaces we cross only with some anxiety or a false offhandedness. (...)

These paintings thus have as their subject passing, emptiness, the transparence of windows, the functionalism of the lighting, the both strong and illegible organization of architectural structures. (...)

These non-places are quite real, and indeed supremely real : they form part of our daily life. At the same time, they are symbols of our world, of our existence in a world of uninhabitable passges. We thus have the two at once - the real and symbols. We can sense that Marrey is disoriented by these 'landscapes' - sometimes he paints the roofs of Paris as if he were dreaming of a city. But in choosing these views, he confronts paintings with a loss of subject ; that is, a loss of intimacy, a loss of the possibility of living and a somewhat oppressive presence of a new space. the allegorical scene is lost. The real scene is absorbed by its spaces. It is in those that henceforth we must find a way to inscribe intimacy - a reflection in a window. (...)

Yves Michaud
Excerpt of the preface of the catalogue of the Gilles Marrey restrospective in the Sens Museum  
February 2006



Music composed and played by Constance Lee