aROSAeSIMONA is a title to be murmured very softly to capture its musicality and attempt to identify the origin of the word: could it be the Latin name of a flower or a plant? In actuality, this variety belongs to the human species. The title is simply the juxtaposition of the first names of two outstanding activists. They were not contemporaries, but both shared deep knowledge and affection for nature and living things. Each in her own way, Rosa (Luxemburg) and Simona (Kossak) had identified the challenges and dangers of an increasingly urban contemporary life, one where human beings draw away from nature to constantly impose on it. This same observation drives Marielle Paul’s work, who paints the idea of a “paradise to create”, as one would create a garden. Her paintings, which she wishes to be “good for thought,” arise from her affection for the mineral and organic worlds of a timeless nature, in contrast with “the other more artificial, harsh, reckless, and blind world, but one that sparkles with all the novelties and discoveries of human beings.”

With the painted material —the ink she “shapes” in thin layers to make it luminous and transparent, and the dense, matte, colourful gouache— Marielle Paul builds microcosms. Great landscape, a lonely tree painted in one swaying stroke, or straight line cutting into the scenery: contrasts coexist and discuss. As poems one would read from top to bottom, from left to right, or simply in fragments, her works form polyphonies made up of autonomous voices.