To mark Drawing Month in Paris, the Galerie Dina Vierny is unveiling a collection of works on paper by Marcel·la Barceló. For this first exhibition devoted exclusively to this medium, the artist has taken over Dina Vierny’s historic apartment at the Musée Maillol.

There is, right at the entrance, a table. Two chairs. A faint pink light. On the other side, a horned creature—an encounter or a reflection. We are looking at something, or something is looking at us. ‘Me and the devil in me’: the title poses the question and refuses to answer it. The scene could be a fairy tale, or perhaps a disguised self-portrait, a projection, an inner figure. It is not a question of whether the devil is real, but of acknowledging that he might be, that he may have been sharing our table all along, that he has our face on the days when we do not recognise ourselves. Marcel·la Barceló does not invite us to an exhibition. She holds up a mirror to us and lets us decide what we see in it.

Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking-Glass, describes Alice’s encounter with a unicorn. The creature says to Alice: “I had always thought that children were fabulous monsters.” Alice replies that she, too, had thought that unicorns were merely imaginary creatures. The two of them come to this pact: If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. A phrase that turns logic on its head: reality reveals itself and eludes us at the same time; it resides in the gaze and in belief; every existence is confirmed by the attention we pay to it. In this mirror world, nothing is fixed; everything is both possible and impossible, and what seemed certain vanishes the moment it is named. What Marcel·la Barceló offers us is not a dialogue with a creature, but with oneself, with that secret and unstable part that resists all definition yet which we recognise. Maldición y esperanzas. Curse and hope embrace, on the same sheet, inseparable.

She works without preparatory sketches. The hand moves freely: pencil, watercolour, ink, natural pigments, glitter varnish. This refusal of sketching is not a pose, but an ethic, almost a faith. It is a matter of not knowing before creating, of letting the hand discover what it seeks whilst seeking. The layers accumulate without one truly erasing the other, like ghostly versions of the same life. The line does not enclose. It tests. It holds the image in a state of constant vibration.

The female figures inhabiting these sheets are of indeterminate age. They hold together wonder and anguish, poised on the brink of their own disappearance, as if their existence depended entirely on the attention paid to them. The landscapes do not serve as a backdrop: they pass through the bodies, dissolving their contours. In Solanaceae, a face grows amongst roots as if it were one of them. In Love after the rain, two silhouettes merge into the rain until they form a single blue, indistinct, serene mass. These presences evoke the Ikiryō of Japanese belief, spirits of living people who haunt humans and places. Neither truly a possession nor quite a doppelgänger, suspended in an in-between space that is not the real but another form of existence. Marcel·la Barceló travels regularly to Japan, and something of this boundary between the visible and the invisible has found its way into her work, alongside autofiction, mythological narratives and eco-spirituality.

In The real is no longer real, a pink silhouette stands in a flood of ink, upright or already swept away. Perhaps this is the heart of it all: this ambivalence. Bodies that are landscapes. Landscapes that become bodies. These drawings, produced over the last five years and drawn from various series, do not trace a trajectory; they shift and recognise one another, like the scattered chapters of a diary whose order has been lost but not its meaning.

This is the first time these works on paper have been shown on their own, in all their coherence and scope. To host them, the Musée Maillol has opened Dina Vierny’s historic apartment, where she moved in 1955 and which she gradually bought up to establish, forty years later, the museum inaugurated in 1995. A domestic and evocative space, imbued with decades of memory that nothing has quite erased. Here, one does not merely contemplate the works: one inhabits them. One moves from one room to the next as if crossing successive thresholds.

The devil is always waiting. At his table, in the rosy light, patient, familiar, almost tender. Whether outside or inside, perhaps it is us. And suddenly, together with Alice and the Unicorn, we have sealed the same pact: to agree to believe in that part of ourselves we do not yet understand, so that it, in return, may agree to exist in the open.
On the page, beneath the hand, in the light.