// PINE / PAINT / POLYCHROMY / GOLD LEAF
// L. 6 x W. 42 x H. 59 CM

// UNIQUE PIECE

Whether it thanks or solicits divine intervention, the ex voto raises the question of beauty. Not of the aesthetic, erudite and learned, but of the beautiful which is not decreed but felt. This quest for beauty, if it is inherent to artistic creation, is not born ex nihilo but is nourished by exchanges. Exchanges between artists and craftsmen and, before that, exchanges between creator and Creator; our Rhombes are, in all points, the perfect witnesses of it.

Beauty is a matter of sensitivity, of a personal taste shaped by experiences and memory. It only takes a moment to realize that not even a patient introspection is enough to identify the characteristics of what we consider beautiful. It is certainly possible to sketch a few features of our personal preferences, but if we were to put them together in a material work, the expected result would be far from the desired goal. Beauty cannot be captured, it captures. It is a great mystery, never elucidated but the only one able to accompany the materialization of an even greater mystery, that of spirituality.

Just like spirituality, the quest for beauty implies renouncing a form of rationality. The beautiful offers to the spirit a support allowing to enter by the visible of the materiality, in the invisible of the thought. The human soul finds in beauty a suspended time of peace, as fleeting as it is. Its evidence offers to the thought a rest which does not embarrass itself of explanation. The beautiful is a matter of humility. Humility of the being and, very often, humility of means.

Simplicity regularly proves to be more striking than its opposite. Thus, beauty requires nothing. The author of this ex voto was probably not a great master of painting, but everything indicates that he conscientiously applied himself to portraying the evangelists, the archangels and the crucified Jesus. The result is no less touching than the work of a renowned painter. Surely this artist was a better sculptor because this disproportionate walled garden, enhanced with gold, invades the eye and reminds us - surely without being aware of it - that nature is the first spectacle of beauty offered to humanity. A show so mysterious and so long unexplainable that it necessarily accompanied... spirituality. The loop is closed.

Ex voto or private devotion, a sincere expression of piety or a humble search for beauty - or even all of these at once - this carved painting, whatever the feeling it awakens, weaves the web that underlies artistic creations. Works created to materialize what the mind has already conceived must be constantly reiterated. For in the same way that we follow the thread of our thoughts, our sensitivity to beauty follows its course, transforms and refines itself. Beauty and spirituality finally reveal their kinship in what we have all experienced: who has never been seized by the beauty of what had already been seen a hundred times?

Text by Marielle Brie

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