DF2 Gallery is pleased to announce Double Happiness a solo exhibition by Swiss-French artist Servane Mary. The show runs from July 14 through August 25, 2007.

In the paintings of Servane Mary, there is a quality of unquiet, an active mental stock taking of the emotive power of images. The purely aesthetic issue of color is heightened by the internal conflict of subject matter, the human figure.  Named after a brand of cigarettes in Asia, Double Happiness focuses on the thin line between two states that has always been part of Servane’s work.
 

In this new series of women’s portraits, made with tempera on wood, or oil and resin, Servane skillfully reproduces faces on a plain background omitting a formal figuration, allowing the emotion represented to become the subject matter.  The influence of Servane’s visual language on the attitude her portraits acquire is inspired by a subject that has fascinated many writers and poets; a substance in the woman’s body. An organ inside which carries the fears and emotions as Denis Diderot first mentioned in his text “Sur les Femmes,” from 1772.

Servane Mary, born in 1972, lives and works in Paris and New York.