Exposition - Cœur de Marie

CŒUR DE MARIE continues Marie-Mam Sai Bellier's work, begun during her residency at CERFAV and echoing L'AMOUR EN CAGE, presented at CAC Passages, Troyes, in January 2025.
This suspended installation, conceived as a tribute to the eponymous flower, brings together a series of pieces combining iron and glass to compose a cryptic, mutant visual language, inspired by Art Nouveau references and defending a contemporary vision of the memento mori. Each work, sometimes the result of graphic design commissions, sometimes conceived for the occasion, becomes a symbol, a sign, or rather one of the words in a sentence that we must decipher in space. Whatever its meaning, it speaks of love, memory and death.

If this research is devoted to a new approach to ornament, embodied, moved and symbolic, if it bears the trace of a particular relationship to the arts of fire, it testifies above all to the loving gaze that the typographer has cast on the legacy of Art Nouveau in the region. It is the fruit of collaborations where art, craft and design intertwine with text to question other forms of writing. Beyond words and the Latin alphabet, these sculptures-ideograms encapsulate stories, but can be read in a multitude of ways. This residency at CERFAV marked a turning point in Marie-Mam Sai Bellier's practice, enabling her to move towards a sensorial, intersectional, ornamental and decolonized approach, where so-called decorative art also draws inspiration from non-Western systems.

As part of Métro'Folies.

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