MARIE DE VILLEPIN

Each painting captures a moment in which memory takes form. Tones of pink, green, red, and blue feel trapped - as if caught in quicksand or solidified in salt - evoking a tension between movement and stillness. Gesture becomes feeling, with each canvas unfolding like an emotional landscape. Forms erode and dissolve, or harden like salt crystals, echoing how we choose to hold on to, or release, our memories.

Set against the backdrop of a world once again marked by upheaval - by war, displacement, ecological fragility, and cultural fragmentation - Marie’s works speak to the quiet resilience of the human spirit. In this moment of geopolitical tension, Turn to Salt becomes not just a personal journey, but a broader meditation on how we process loss, reckon with history, and search for meaning amidst uncertainty. The salt that runs through these canvases is a metaphor - an elemental trace of survival and transformation.

Looking back becomes an act of reflection, curiosity, and defiance. The works ask whether we must make peace with the past to move forward - a question that lingers in all our lives. Marie draws from her own journey, echoing artists who have challenged convention by confronting the past to better understand the present. Salt, in these works, becomes a quiet witness. It’s what remains after time has passed—a trace of contact, a crystallised memory. In Turn to Salt, turning back is not a punishment, but a way to acknowledge what came before.

Created during different moments, each painting carries its own rhythm and story. Together, they form a quiet, cohesive narrative. With each brushstroke, Marie crystallises reality, turning lived experience into lasting form. She does not simply reflect the world; she reimagines it. And in that reimagining, she crosses into the realm of myth and legend - where memory becomes monument, and the personal becomes eternal.

Artist Statement:

Salt preserves. Salt wounds. Salt heals. In Turn to Salt, Marie de Villepin gathers a body of work suspended in contradiction, beauty and desolation, transformation and stillness, memory and myth. Drawing from the biblical image of Lot’s wife turning to salt as she looks back, an act of mourning, defiance, or reverence. These paintings linger at the edge of irreversible change.

Each canvas captures a moment when time crystallizes. Figures blur into landscapes; places decay into textures. The surfaces hold traces of tenderness and erosion as if exposed to weather, to longing, to grief. There’s a sense that looking too long, or too hard, might fix something in place forever.

Rather than warning against the gaze backward, Turn to Salt reclaims it. It’s an invitation to witness what remains when everything else dissolves. The sediment of memory, the mineral shape of regret, the slow crystallization of truth.

What do we preserve by looking back? What do we lose when we don’t?