Collection: 'Ellipses - Odette Marais

Ellipses

Odette Marais

08.03.25 - 12.04.25

Odette Marais’ latest solo exhibition, Ellipses, captures the essence of the in-between... between gesture and meaning, between what is seen and what is felt. Her work serves as a repository of time and memory, preserving residual traces of lived thought and experience through intuitive, process-driven mark-making.

Marais approaches her practice as an act of distillation, where meaning is neither imposed nor fixed but instead emerges through a quiet accumulation of marks. Her compositions arise from an ongoing dialogue between material and memory, where each mark, each layer, becomes evidence of what came before. Collage, fabric, and textual fragments thread through the compositions, their edges frayed and layered, like echoes of something once held, now slipping from grasp. Objects also appear in a state of suspension: a table, a flower—domestic forms unmoored from context, tilted and teetering between the familiar and the ambiguous. These compositions hover in a liminal space, evoking the subtle tension of moments suspended in time, not scenes but fleeting instants, not statements but pauses.

The artist reflects on her works as “solitary moments... when dust settles and light touches. Time, evidence, and absence. A juncture, an instant, captured... just before or just after”. Each piece an evolution that carries the imprint of time passing, reinforcing the notion that presence is transient, and what remains is an intimately personal trace of what once was.

The exhibition’s title, Ellipses, speaks to this notion of intentional withholding—a space carved out for the unspoken, the unfinished, the in-between. These works do not dictate but invite. They offer no singular reading, only an openness, a generosity of time and presence. Marais, ever a formalist, moves between structure and dissolution with instinctive precision, balancing illustration and abstraction in a way that allows objects to breathe and dissolve, to exist and fade away.

“a shimmer, a shadow, a quiet exhalation”

It is within this stillness that Ellipses finds its resonance—where light lingers, where time shifts, where meaning is found not in the ocean of what is stated, but in the wake of what is left unsaid.