Until June 29, in the glass roof of the Pams hotel, in Perpignan, the city’s culture department, presents the pictorial exhibition of Diane Garcès de Marcilla, entitled “by the prism of water”.
Born in Havana, a Cuban mother and a French father, Diane Garcès de Marcilla lives today south of Toulouse. It is from childhood that painting enters the life of this contemplative loner. “Very young, I was captivated by watercolor, she recalls. I was not trying to make something technically drinking, it was rather my way of expressing my feelings of the world ”. Among its great influences, impressionism. In large part self-taught, however, in the 1980s, she attended the Beaux-Arts de Perpignan. Studies that quickly disappointed it: “The time was with concept and mental complexities. And I wanted to stay in connection with the emotion of what I saw and that I wanted to transcribe. So, I went to live for some time in New York. I discovered an abundant energy there, and I met three important artists who guided me in my quest ”.
Mainly through landscapes with serene waters, Diane Garcès de Marcilla praises slowness. “What I’m looking for for myself is a source of balance and inner peace, she says. Beyond the turmoil of life, there is a possibility of making silence, of drawing in itself very deeply. And in this place, find calm. My painting is completely meditative. This universal tranquility that I impregnates on the web, I want to communicate it to others ”.
Drusting water
“Everything is around us, it’s about looking. All my landscapes are places where I have been, the portraits are those of my loved ones ”. Diane Garces of Marcila painted after photos: “What interests me above all is to work for forms, whether landscapes or faces. The framework of the table, I design it by computer. On the canvas, I go to the flesh, that is to say the color and its effects ”.
Water, its symbolic power, travels all its work. First by the technique: “The magic of colored water, its transparency, the glacis, have always interested me”, she explains. In his acrylics, the artist plays with gravity: water circulates, creates paths, takes layers of color, erases or reveals reality. In addition to landscapes, Diane Garcès de Marcilla therefore painted softened faces and caressing hands. By tightened reframing, we then enter the sphere of intimate: the effect of water that crosses the mind and soothes it.
This work is a matter of sensation, of poetry. No claim. However, in two or three paintings, the artist represents man’s hands that collect water: “I have entitled these canvases of gold in my hands, because the water is more precious than the gold of the world. Without it, no life on our planet ”.
The painting of Diane Garcès de Marcilla contains time: that necessary for the artist to anchor his words, that necessary for the visitor to appreciate it. She calls a break: temporarily extracts from our “timings” devoured by the urgency of doing, looking at, and returning to the world perhaps more aware of an essential which gives us between our fingers.
