From June 20 to August 1, Galerie Dina Vierny presents “Still Waters Run Deep” by Marcel·la Barceló in its new space at 53 rue de Seine.
Bringing together a selection of recent works, this exhibition explores the evocative power of water through its myths and beliefs. Liquefied landscapes and bodies, aquatic nymphs and mermaids, torrential rains and underwater volcanoes coexist here, invoking through the notion of wet ontology a liquid gaze upon the world.

Marcel·la Barceló (born in 1992 in Palma de Mallorca) is a Catalan painter based in Paris. Her imagination, shaped by multiple geographical ties — between the Balearic Islands, France, and Japan — reflects a sensibility influenced by these territories.

The exhibition takes its title from the eponymous painting “Still Waters Run Deep”, which depicts a woman-island lying on the horizon of an apparently calm sea. “Still Waters Run Deep” can be translated as the proverb “Still waters run deep” or “Beware of still waters.” As writer Blandine Rinkel notes in the exhibition catalogue: “The expression ‘Still waters run deep’ seems to have been invented to describe Marcel·la’s work, and pronouncing it aloud is enough to feel that everything could be otherwise, that the world, as we know it, is full of untapped energies. What teems beneath the surface?”

Water holds a central place in the artist’s universe. More than a simple motif, it structures the mental space of the paintings, becoming a material of metamorphosis. Aquatic forests, submerged islands, and dreamlike reefs give the viewer the impression of floating in a liquefying space. Marcel·la Barceló even compares the act of painting to the Greek myth of the birth of Venus: “a primordial chaos, a mixture of blood, semen, and sea foam, from which a perceptible form emerges.”

Among the recurring figures in this floating world are young girls with diaphanous, melting bodies emerging from the scenery—naiads whose names appear in the titles of certain paintings: “Lorelei”, “Cyané”, or “Léthé”. The exploration of these ambivalent figures, who drift between threat and seduction, continues with “La Sirène (▼▲)”, the artist’s first major sculpture, presented exclusively as part of the exhibition—“an androgynous creature, male fire against female water,” as author Esther Teillard describes it. Standing two meters tall, this upside-down bronze mermaid is inspired by the yoga pose sirsasana, sleeping bats, and The Hanged Man from the Marseille Tarot deck.

This idea of imaginary inversion also guided Marcel·la Barceló in the series of reflection paintings, in which the mirror-image becomes as real as its source, and sky and sea are reversed, following the alchemical idea drawn from the "Emerald Tablet": “That which is below is like that which is above.” The artist explains what drove her to work with this motif: “I wanted to look at the earth from the sea, to flood the frame of the solid world. I love formally representing this mass of condensed matter, trapped between two aqueous expanses of sky and water. Islands are like fragments of consciousness emerging from an ocean whose depths would be the unconscious: from the shoreline, our lucidity is distorted into a double blur. Our reflection would be like our dreams and anxieties, the mirrored real merging with the invisible teeming beneath the water.”

Far from the certainties of solid ground, Marcel·la Barceló’s works draw us into a fluid imaginary, immersing us in the aquarium of the night and reminding us, as Bachelard writes in “Water and Dreams”, that “it is by remaining long enough on the iridescent surface that we will understand the value of depth.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Lucia Pesapane, Blandine Rinkel, and Esther Teillard.

Recent exhibitions: Terrada Art Complex; Château La Coste; Fondation Carmignac; M.O.C.O. Panacée; Villa Emerige.

Public collections: Fondation Louis Vuitton; Château La Coste; Fondation Carmignac; Fondation d'Art Contemporain Daniel et Florence Guerlain; Collection Emerige; Ibiza Museum of Contemporary Art; Fondazione Arte Scienza Videoinsight, Turin; Xiao Museum, Shanghai.