Danish artist Maria Dubin exhibits his new collection made in Tunisia. The opening will take place at the Fahrenheit gallery in Carthage.
Maria Dubin has often exhibited in Tunisia, a country where she lived for several years. It was at the turn of the new century that this Danish artist presented her first Tunisian works, at the Maison des Arts.
At this time, she explored the mosaics of the Bardo museum by appropriating them by ceramics, weaving and painting. This exhibition was organized by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs which thus intended to pay tribute to Maria Dubin.
Since then, the latter has often returned to Tunisia while pursuing a brilliant international career. A year ago, during the month of Ramadan, Dubin was in Tunis to be inspired by a garden in the heart of Bab Souika but hidden in the fertile memory of the Medina of Tunis.
It is in this garden that she created her new collection, the one she will present today at the Fahrenheit gallery. Artistic wink or objective chance? Maria Dubin exhibited in this same gallery, a collection dedicated to another garden which is in Copenhagen.
It was in 2021 and two years later, it was like two gardens that merged thanks to the intercession of an exemplary artist. In this text, we try to flush out the processes at work in Maria Dubin’s approach and her aesthetic method to bring out a floral universe in a chromatic humus from several gardens.
Artistic alloys and light parables
Not all gardens are secret. Only, they still keep as well a bushy mystery as a spark of life. This is why walking in a garden often amounts to picking metaphors of life and lumen parables.
Maria Dubin is experiencing real artistic elevations in her gardens. She creates fleeting alloys there and multiplied the observation sheets on the dialectic that the shapes and colors maintain.
From its first scented garden thus arose a thousand and one flowers which symbolically connect it to Karen Blixen. In a lasting effort and a mnemic quest, Maria Dubin plunged her gaze into these flowers and extracted the deep sense of all continuity, all regeneration.
The Danish artist thus recreated the Blixen garden by projecting himself and appropriating it. In doing so, she placed herself in the wake of the great writer and probably, realized her wish to see the inspirations come across in a place which is first of all a waking dream.
Because Maria Dubin likes to seek and flush out poetic correspondences and know how to transform a simple garden into a symbol forest. With repeated gestures on a daily basis, with a picking that takes on the appearance of Carpe Diem, an artist pays tribute to another artist does so in the counting and sobriety, grabs the back of what she voice and shows us.
In her first garden, Maria tracks down metamorphoses and puts the real abyss with what makes him multiple, what is constantly flowing, what changes shape, buds, hatches and fades. Because a garden is life and an eternal restart where one is born to go out and become again.
Between Blixen reminiscences and Tunisian fragrances
It is strong from these convictions and this bright artistic project that Maria Dubin has opened the doors of a new garden. This time in Tunis, far from the mists of Copenhagen, in a terroir where the water does not always flow to waves. In this harsh and dignified nature, he was a Celé garden in the mazes of the medina, a place in charge of life and spirituality.
How to establish the artistic device dear to Maria Dubin? The question is as fertile as it is complex because we are in an old convent in the aisles of which the prayers of the Catholic sisters who lived it.
Maria in her new garden quickly joined this environment in her approach. To tell the truth, she managed to give birth to grass leaves and corolles of meaning. Each work sounds like a whole, an equidistant universe of poetry of a Walt Whitman and the Shintô echoes which can spring from a flower. It is a garden-eden that the artist crunches, draws and painted. And this garden becomes like the reflection of its own reflection.
Difficult not to think of the Sufis who populated these districts of medieval Tunis and could meditate on whole days in front of a flower. Like them, Maria detects the “Dhaher” (which is visible) and the “Batten” (which is in everything but cannot be seen).
Thus, she takes spiritual paths to find this quintessence and put it before our eyes. Only the initiates will be able to go to the ecstatic depths. The others will caress flowers with their gaze, will find them beautiful or strange and perhaps preshine what they do not see.
In her second garden, Maria Dubin collects the flowers of asceticism and meditation. Planted by Christian sisters, watered by Muslim hands, flowering in a mystical soil, these stamens of pollens, these fragile stems, are a reflection of life and a condensed of chance.
With flowers for Ariane thread
It was in the middle of Ramadan, when the ritual fast took place, that Maria Dubin recreated these flowers, picked them to make them chromatic beings. In the silence of the city that prays, in the humus of a garden where cultures surreptitiously dialogue, this surprising series was born.
The bright and warm colors, the raw and fleeting shapes refer to the syntax of Maria’s works. The flowers are like disembodied, absurd, free and aberrant. Our gaze crosses them, linger on the textures, suspends their strangeness and then remembers the garden where they pushed, recalls Maria in the grip with what she perceives, also remembers another garden in Copenhagen.
Between reminiscences of Blixen and Tunisian fragrances, Maria Dubin vogue between two gardens and pays tribute to two countries that are hers. With flowers for Ariane thread and colors that are the credo of an artist who, according to the adage, cultivates her extreme gardens.
