Art Musings presents Fête Champêtre, and invite you to savour a rare delight: the paintings of two generations; a mother and a daughter, each an artist in her own distinctive right, shown together. For mother and daughter Maïté Delteil and Maya Burman, painting forms a lineage, a bloodline; and inspiration originates from the inner lives of the artists. The resultant compositions are bound to personal histories and images from the unconscious, making for paintings replete with layered realities. Living and working in France and India, both mother and daughter draw on the diverse aesthetics of these cultures. Maïté’s evocations of nature and Maya’s buoyant figures encourage an identification with the intimate dramas being performed in these paintings.
In the painterly universe of enchantments and epiphanies that Maïté conjures into being, time is calibrated through the unfolding of the seasons; through the rhythms of waking and dream; and through the transitions between interior and landscape. In Maya’s lively tableaux, time is measured out by reference to the successive stages of childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity; its rhythms play out between the childhood world of toys and the grown-up world of built and engineered objects. For both artists, time is recast as stylised narrative.
Maïté’s small oil on canvas works play with scale, as she dwells on fruits, flowers, and birds with a miniaturist’s love of jewel-like detail. Maïté’s palette is scrumptious; glowing reds, pollen-bright yellows, candied pinks, lambent blues and succulent greens. While the viewer luxuriates in the chromatic exuberance of these paintings, one is also reminded that bloom is succeeded by decay, summer by autumn: these evocations of the arboreal and the horticultural are also articulations of the vanitas, the memento mori. These paintings emerge at the cusp between landscape and still life, between nature and nature morte.
Maya’s oil on canvas paintings are animated by a joie de vivre, expressed in the pneumatic bounce of the figures, the abundance of nature, the flowers that seem to cross over from the overhanging branches of trees to the patterns on the clothes of girls at play, the choreography of figures who shuttle between the frescos of ancient cities and the streets of present-day metropolitan centres that the artist invokes. Maya approaches life through the registers of the game, the feast, and the dance. Maya portrays the protagonists of her paintings in postures of heightened play: leisure as a form of gracefully slowed down athleticism, expressing itself through a finesse of gesture in a pictorial space that appears to have been shaped as textile, as tapestry.
