Interstices – Martine Rey

For more than 40 years, after her first stay in Japan during which she learned the ancestral art of urushi lacquer, the artist has been working to produce pieces that reflects her image, discreet, humanistic, deep, delicate, and which has made a technique and a material both a subject and her medium.

The sap taken from the bled tree is delicately transformed in her practice. Originally used in the decorative arts to cover porous surfaces with an ornamental varnish, Japanese lacquer finds a new use and releases a new language in Martine Rey’s artistic gesture. In turn, it becomes a revelator, an ink and a balm.

With this fluid essential to life, she lets her thoughts and memories flow in order to reconstitute her roots, map existence, detect the invisible, punctuate history and dress the object that has been brought to the rank of relic. The narrative she composes is a journey, an incursion into an interstice, an in-between that is deciphered and written by the use of symbols, dreamed up, invented, brought to light, sacred. Thanks to lacquer, she thwarts the time that is paradoxically so long in the implementation of the material, she explores a singular and universal space, fed by multiple references.

From the East to the West, from the banks of the Nile to the coasts of Japan and the French mountains of Isère, between nature and culture, between work and object, Martine Rey’s work surrenders to the poetry of its aesthetics and is covered in apparent simplicity. It nonetheless conceals a literate whole that sails between the territory of impermanence and the infinity of the horizon. A game of signs, tracks and galleries that projects the common and instinctive feeling of belonging to these floating, underground and celestial worlds.