Confabulations
Conversation with Sofia Dati
Sofia Dati, curator of "Confabulations" at WIELS
Excerpt from "Le Jardin sans soleil", Posture Editions, p. 138
‘Confabulations’ reflects Marie Zolamian’s attempt to construct
memory through art, to shape moments through
the imaginary and consider them as recollections. Working
through multiple languages, Marie Zolamian is an artist
whose work weaves together worlds at the crossroads of
reality, fabulation and disorientation. In her paintings,
drawings, multimedia works and installations, she traces
a path through memory, creation and displacement. The
following conversation offers a loose drift through her artistic
practice and the constellations that emerge within it.
Sofia Dati: In your work you use different materials,
from oil painting to mosaic, and from watercolour
to textile printing. But whatever the medium, your
work remains rooted in painting, which you studied at the
École supérieure des arts in Liège. How would you describe
your relationship to the history, the technique and
the field of painting more generally, which your practice
embraces in such a unique way?
Marie Zolamian: One day, standing in front of one of
my paintings, I was asked if I was a believer.
I replied, ‘Yes, I believe in painting.’
I chose painting at the age of twenty-five, as a person
chooses a language that they recognise without having
learned it. This choice was both intuitive and fundamental,
like an attraction to a primal existential enigma.
Painting is a medium without boundaries that receives,
brings forth, and allows things to come into being.
It imposes a slow and hyper-concentrated temporality
and a direct relationship with the material: the choice of
the panel and the canvas, the hide glue in a bain-marie,
the tension of the linen on the panel, the succession of thin
layers of coating before the intermingling of the oils.
Those gestures prior to the appearance of an image are
already part of painting; they are its memory.
To paint is to inhabit those visible and invisible layers, to
see a stratification being built where history and tradition
deposit, dissolve, and reappear otherwise.
Each support becomes a space prepared for exploration,
a waiting ground where the material and the gaze merge;
where the forms, colours, and figures emerge and look
back at us.
Once the process stops, the painting no longer belongs to
me. And it all starts over again.