Longing is a diffuse state of desire, of aspiration, of yearning, even of nostalgia. It does not have a precise object but makes us face a feeling of unfulfillment. Art, just like history, has always offered a wealth of languishing feminine figures. A consuming and creative passion, languor —a mirror of spleen— arises as a particularly feminine feeling, as a state of those who allow themselves to feel, to feel that absence, that irreparable nostalgia.

The exhibition Le Mur vert bouteille (A Wall Bottle Green), Danish artist Maria Zahle’s first in France, is built around that longing, in a wider sense of absence, grief, and melancholia. Its title echoes a wall that Maria Zahle’s grandmother had painted, as a liberating gesture, in her seaside house. A space for independence and creativity, that house was also the host of loneliness, of heartaches, of absent or dead men, and of languishing women. Today, the colour green is found as thin threads in her series Længsel (Longing): woven works separated by a horizontal strip in two parts —one dark, the other of a warm light— and held in space by a sculpted bronze suspension which anchors and supports. Her compositions are also a nod to a diagram presented by her mythology professor: at the top, the word “deities,” at the bottom, the word “humans,” and pointing upwards an arrow bearing the word Længsel, longing.

Thus, Le Mur vert bouteille connects women’s lived experiences, memories, and tales. But it also serves to highlight the importance of colour for the artist: more than a mere pictorial element, colour is a physical body, a material, a tool to her.