TOUT VA BIEN
solo exhibition
Gallery Jerome Nivet-Carzon
Paris
​2016

Repetition sometimes consists of a thought which constantly returns to the same questions and formulates them again and again adopting successively a response and its opposite.

With Rachel Marks, this is an obsessive process that may be based on a doubt, a hesitation between the chosen repetition and its opposite. Is the obsession a source of conflict or the path to resolution of this conflict? 

It all started with an intense interest for a small sentence read randomly on a paper bag. The phrase "Tout va bien" (all is well), is a questioning of her exterior world around her as well as her interior world.  This fortuitous encounter with these three words immediately became a pattern punctuated by its regular appropriation. She has gradually collected, cut, touched, stored, preserved. Rachel Marks has always been fascinated by the signs-writing, symbol, language she finds along the way as mysterious clues and which insidiously move her destiny and identity.

This compulsive appropriation acts as a mantra of everyday life which it repeats in accordance with an imposed rhythm. It is perhaps a transient addiction in the most physical sense - here the tactile and visual relationship with the paper material.

In the slightest moment of latency, she continues and tirelessly traces the phrase so light and so heavy as a therapy she inflicts - or releases. Her artistic gestures follow a rhythm in which the artist seeks comfort and reflection. She thus puts the scene on the rhythm of a personal calendar to better understand our cultural language as well as state of our world. Rachel Marks even covers a terrestrial globe as if she wanted to cover the world with her obsession without leaving the least virgin territory of this chosen recurrence. This globe, shines with a red light as a warning of the contrary, that everything might not be well in the world.