The First Period of My Painting is Love..." by Maurice Denis at Pauline Pavec

"The first period of my painting is love," wrote Maurice Denis in 1939, and it is this more intimate phase of the French painter's (1870-1943) work that the Pauline Pavec gallery dedicates this exhibition to. One of the central figures of the Nabis and an active participant in the renewal of sacred art at the turn of the 20th century, Denis also produced sublime family scenes centered on his wife, Marthe Meurier, and their children—without ever abandoning his formal investigations, inherited from the lessons of Gauguin and Sérusier, which he summarized in the famous statement that a painting is, above all, a flat surface covered with colors organized in a certain order. Works such as "Procession nuptiale" and "Bernadette et sa mère" highlight this mastery of cloisonnism, while in "Le berceau du petit frère" and "Bébé au sein," the artist constructs a subtle orchestration of gazes that turns the viewer into an almost accomplice to the intimate scene depicted. In the portraits of Marthe, such as "Portrait de Marthe aux Rubans," the sensuality of the pose coexists with a discreet modesty in the model's face, suggesting intimacy and companionship rather than the distant, voyeuristic gaze that Western art history usually reserves for the female figure—an interpretation that the exhibition brings closer to the analyses of John Berger and Griselda Pollock on the construction of the female body in painting.