Folded souls: Marie Isabelle Poirier Troyano

How does life emerge from inert matter? This is the question that permeates Marie Isabelle Poirier Troyano’s work. With this question in mind, she delves into the recesses of our cultural memory; where our dead materials lie, our little pieces of forgotten materials (jute, linen, denim, leather, wool, etc.); all these abandoned fragments of a once-useful object, a piece of clothing, a piece of furniture. But the purpose of art is not to restore usefulness to these forgotten materials; it is actually about giving them life—and that is something else entirely. 

Marie Isabelle bends the material, she folds and refolds it; but make no mistake: the life she gives does not come from her hands. For Marie Isabelle’s art is the art of developing the folds that are wrapped up in inert material, of bringing out their traces; she is a photographer of invisible folds. But how can you photograph what cannot be seen? These folds in the material do not emit light that a lens can capture; nor do they form shapes that the eye can see. The art of sewing, dyeing, and removing dye is not an art of copying; it is about trusting the material. The secret of Marie’s art is not to deny that this material has already bent under external constraints, that it has always been folded.

Where did these folds come from? From a life that is not yet that of living organisms (soul), but which cannot be reduced to the simple existence of inert materials (matter). This life is what Gilles Deleuze called “the infinite fold” in his book on Leibniz. Marie’s art imitates nothing, reproduces nothing; on the contrary, it connects to the very movement of this infinite fold, at the intersection between soul and matter. Our soul has thousands of folds, which are all our small perceptions, those of which we are unaware (such as the sound of each sea spray when we hear the crash of the waves). Matter, too, has thousands of folds, all its curves (the waves themselves). Marie’s art consists in prolonging the contact between the folds of the soul and the folds of matter, by means of a fundamental gesture, that of sewing, on which all her canvases and sculptures are based. But this gesture is that of life itself, between the soul and matter, a movement of infinite folding.

Text by Aurélien Fossey