Exhibition of Marion Flament
La Junqueira Residency
Lisbon, Portugal
2023
Catalog available here
There’s something of that spirit in Marion Flament’s “Sombra Ardente”. A kindred meditation on lights and their mystique. During her residency, the artist wandered through Lisbon to collect impressions, careful not to be blinded. She observed the glistening azulejos, got swayed by the orange gleam of the night, sought solace in church tapers’ flames, and became an interpreter of the sun.
Looking to transcend the exhibition space, she built some kind of chapel, devoid of religious symbolism yet still imbued with an aura of sacred energy. Within its confine, she shares her profound passion for glass and its transformative processes, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the captivating forces of combustion, melting, and fusion, and to travel in different states. Tinting the windows, she invites the audience for a dark iridescent dance in one room before bathing them in yellow in another.
Marion Flament engaged with the spiritual art of stained glass, though breaking free from the confines of its convention and traditional motifs. On a pane adorned with a dusky filter, sooty paint stains become vibrant matt er. On a wall, Manchas de luz features voluminous glass fused shapes, embodying the abstract and evershift ing beauty of sunrays cast upon the floor after going through colored windows.
Through these works and scenic gestures, the artist asks: how can one speak of light while addressing its shadow? In addition, her use of transparency and opacity, both as concepts and materials’ properties, highlight a reflection on absence – on what can’t be grasped, what is missing, what has vanished.
The resident’s journey was marked by a crucial visit to the Church of Sao Domingos, a building that survived a cataclysmic triptych: the earthquake, tsunami, and fire of November 1st, 1755, which nearly destroyed the entire city. Her work in Lisbon then turned into a tribute to those resilient places still exposing the trauma embedded in their stones.
In echo, Marion Flament captures and preserves remnants of fire by painting with soot directly on glass. She exhibits wounds and tears (As lágrimas de São Domingos). Sometimes, the fire still burns, as a candle is placed behind the panel, illuminating the streaks and creating striking contrasts with smoky darkness. Organic shadows grow and iron filings sprout like foreign plants, ready to spread in space.
These burning shadows and flickering lights (Lumières vacillantes) seem to mirror spirits. And other artworks’ titles actually evoke (invoke perhaps?) past beings still haunting the city: ghosts of horses hang on walls (O fantasma do cavalo 1, 2) while puppets hover over ground (Pantin 1, 2, 3). On the floor, a bell (A hora líquida) echoes its ancestors, the ones which unwittingly sounded the death knell of the tremor disaster at 9:40 a.m., during the second mass of All Saints’ Day.
This motif of the bell recurs several times, and is part of a chorus of centuries or millennia old objects, collected from markets and abandoned places alike (the ones the artist is most fond of are often intended to hang or be hung - rowlocks, doorstep ornaments and, above all, blacksmith’s nails). When not using them directly, she captures their imprints and incorporates them into her artworks.
Presented in thermoformed glass in A sombra do Carmo, keys and nails seem destined to forever float in the air, as if they had permanently fused during the catastrophe. The work indeed references the diamond-shaped stained glass of the Carmo Convent, another architecture that survived the earthquake - though it is now roofless. The window appears here to be caught in an in-between state, simultaneously frozen like ice and melting as if still impacted by the heat of the fire. As if the material allowed the crystallization of colliding times.
Objects also come together in out-of-scale rosaries and surrealists bellrope and lamppost (Chapelet 1, 2, 3, 4; O som perfurante; Um amarelo desvanecido). Blending glazed ceramics, raw clay and blown glass, creating gradients of colors and opacity, depicting fragments of lives and shards of stories, suspending candles even, they serve as an ultimate connection between the different artworks of the exhibition and urge visitors to explore layers of history.
In this space of resonance, where lights dance and shadows converse, a nail may become a bell and a candle may also be a clock. Concealing metal items, O tempo fluindo’s wax eventually rings the end of “Sombra Ardente”. Time drips, memory shines.