Video and wallpaper are not usually terms we think of in tandem. One is concrete, one is transient, one decorative and made as background, the other often complex, pithy, front and center on a TV screen imparting to us some small revelation. In her first solo exhibition at Luxe, Marie Maillard creates an elegant and enigmatic hybrid, which not only conflates these oppositions but utilizes each to redefine the other. Video is used decoratively and formally, while wallpaper suddenly becomes quizzical. Maillard isolates a brief snippet from a film by Pasolini and bathes the gallery in its stacked and staggered repetition. Accompanying this shorn morsel is a soundtrack composed of a looped splice from a pop song, a smoldering voice whispers to us the same few words, image and sound coalescing into a hypnotizing bit of pleasure. The artist continues to overlap, isolate and distort in photographs which physically breakdown images into composite parts. A quiet scene quickly morphs into corresponding multicolored lines as if we were literally seeing the transition between the stalwart terms `art’ and `life’.

Maillard negates the origin narrative of her recomposed slivers, changing their context and highlighting the formalism of the parts. This act brings up the self-reflexivity and aesthetic infatuation of Modernism without being Modernist. Maillard is riding the boundaries of architecture, design, fashion, and formalism as if she is saying to us “remember when…” yet remaining our theoretical guide as opposed to a nostalgic practitioner.