Martine Rey

Martine Rey first encountered the “urushi” vegetal lacquer in Japan, alongside Master Shinkai. The artist was then faced with a material whose application technique mirrored her own personal and artistic journey. In Japan, lacquer is appreciated as a prestigious artform. However, it is always linked to the “dressing” of objects, applied with patience and delicacy. For two years, while respectfully learning the constitutive skills this secular practice requires, the artist released a narrative project in which lacquer now uncovered the anonymous, abandoned and neglected object. She shifts our attention to its story to describe its unsuspected depth. Both a surface and a reflection, lacquer abandons its protective and decorative dimension to become a precious material in its own right, testifying to the passing of time on “ordinary things” which are glorified as relics, talismans.

Martine Rey hereby composes a common space of discovery and intimacy which superimposes memories and gestures, one that slips into the multiple layers of lacquer like submerged palimpsests. Lacquer is there to mark the passing of time, it is the link between present and memory.