Marie Chamant: Signes et sons

lilia ben salah gallery is pleased to present Signs and Sounds, a solo exhibition by Marie Chamant, a singular figure on the contemporary art scene whose work has, for several decades, explored the deep connections between language, writing, memory, and the sacred.

 

More of a researcher than a visual artist, Marie Chamant has developed a practice where the sign becomes a territory and the letter a living material. In her multicolored and protean artist books, words drift, gather, fragment, repeat, or burst in every direction. Each page is a space of freedom where the text unfolds vertically, horizontally, right-side-up or upside-down, blending upper and lowercase letters in a dense and poetic visual choreography. A selection of these artist books is presented in the exhibition, among the fifteen that are available for consultation at the Librairie Kandinsky of the Centre Pompidou and at L'Enseigne des Oudin.

 

Signs and Sounds highlights the fertile tension between free form and invisible structure, between writing and orality, between the sound of language and the memory of the sign. The exhibition reveals a body of work that relentlessly questions the origins of meaning and the foundations of language. Whether through the Aleph, the Hebrew alphabet, Chinese ideograms, or the Arabic alphabet, the artist seeks to reconnect with a primordial, matrix-like language capable of linking cults and epochs.

 

This research is part of a broader commitment to interfaith dialogue. From the late 1960s, Marie Chamant initiated the Centre Poly Cultuel project, developed in sculptural-architectural collaboration with the Simonnet, shown at major venues such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1967), UNESCO (1969), and the Adda‘Wa Mosque (1998). Her work weaves a subtle link between aesthetics, symbolic thought, and the coexistence of beliefs.

 

With Signs and Sounds, Marie Chamant invites us on a sensory journey through her world—one where the word becomes breath, each letter resonates, and language reclaims its sacred, living, and vibratory dimension.