In Fight or F/light, Anaïs Maar doesn’t simply paint with color—she paints with transformation. There is an almost paradoxical beauty in her work, where darkness and light, struggle and growth, exist side by side. Her canvases are alive with vibrant yellows, fiery reds, and bold oranges, as though each hue is fighting to emerge from the shadows. It’s a celebration of light, but not the kind that simply radiates from above—it’s the kind that rises slowly, almost painfully, from within.
- Ingrid Lundgren
Anaïs Maar’s painting strikes at first glance with its profound clarity. Blazing hues spread across each canvas like magma, lights drawn from the depths, slowly rising to the surface. There is what we see and what we can only guess, what bursts forth in the effusion of color and what remains deeply buried beneath the surface. A maar is a volcanic explosion crater, often filled with a lake. It is the calm after the storm, the muffled rumbling of magma beneath still waters. It is a painting of eruption and radiance, a painting that burns and heals, that irradiates and consoles. Like volcanic soil, it is both dangerous and fertile, paradoxical.
It questions the pains we have buried, piled up in the depths of our souls. These molten wounds, restless, bubbling—will they one day explode? And if they erupt, what light will they produce? More than anything, will we fight them or flee? This, to me, is Anaïs’s striking inspiration in Fight or F/light: rehabilitating flight as a legitimate response to adversity. There are battles worth fighting, and others that are nothing but destruction. Eruptions produce light, but some also bury the world beneath them.
Echoing this strategy, Anaïs’s painting is inherently dual: beneath its colorful and joyful, playful, and often grotesque appearance, it confronts us with vulnerable, threatened figures. The marvelous oil on wood Shield depicts a naked woman sheltering behind a swan she holds by the neck. The lines are synthetic, the palette luminous, yet the subject fundamentally questions our relationship with the female body—forced to conceal its nudity behind innocence, to protect a purity imposed upon it. The swan’s sinuous neck, an overt phallic symbol, heightens the scene’s ambiguity, the impossible reconciliation of opposing expectations placed upon the figure.
Like Shield, Anaïs’s works always open onto ambiguous, cryptic situations. Captured in action, the characters keep the secret of their emotions. Are they benevolent or threatening, joyful or melancholic? No answer is given to us; it is up to us to decipher the symbols the painter scatters across the canvas, to infuse them with our inner struggles, our fights, and our flights. As a painting of relationships, Anaïs’s work reflects the imbalances that shape our interactions with others—this foundational instability that drives us to either struggle or evade, revealing us to ourselves at the same time it exposes us to the world.
Symbolism plays an essential role in Anaïs’s practice. The animal figures that punctuate the exhibition form a true personal mythology—a vital mode of communication. From the seashell to the lamb, from the swan to the serpent, they are avatars of the artist, embodying different facets of her being. This intimate bestiary imbues the work with an almost sacred dimension. Each animal appears before us laden with ancient symbols, renewed through the artist’s personal interpretations. The serpent, biblical tempter, is also a symbol of healing and regeneration, as seen in This is what you want, where the artist, by ingesting the reptile, embraces this dual nature.
In Fight or F/light, Anaïs Maar paints the complexity of human emotions. Her soft, colorful figures grapple as much as they embrace, reveal themselves as much as they protect themselves, their nudity cloaked in a veil of symbols. Light is never unchallenged, yet it shines all the brighter against the surrounding darkness. It is a painting of joy after pain, a gentle yet powerful eruption, a call to vulnerability. “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Armand Camphuis, Art Curator
