Onirism, a users’ guide

Enjoy the unusual, smile at the playful language and images, believe in chance. Then follow the words into illustrated dream – fragments.
Dive in, immerse fully, drink in the fantasy: flower or target or flame sex. Fire sex.
Pretend to understand and loose your way in the mysterious summons.
Tame by escalating danger sarcastic baboon, man-eating tiger, the other – then one’s own double.
Be devoured. Understand and accept it. And, ultimately, enjoy the unmentionable.

Françoise Osteaux

The restless body floats freely through these empty spaces: naked, clothed, right side up or upside down, headless, rebuilt, hybrid. An entertaining, erotic, sensuous and, at times, burlesque dance evolves from one sequence to the next.
When the painting is heard, it’s through a precise, sensitive brush stroke that fleshes out the bodies, genitals and faces to which the artist expertly gives colour. Elsewhere shapes fade, sucked up by the white of the paper and sent to oblivion.
The bodies, sometimes in a domestic setting, possibly recall memories. Of childhood? Elsewhere, they’re tied to odd microstructures, little exhilarating explosions whose dense smoke has consumed the emotions, the fantasies and the desires at the heart of the stories.

Desire really is the point when the reader is invited to « make spotless sheets sing » or to « light up household odours ». Desire too in the « dehiscence of bursts of laughter » or « the complex geometry of unconditional love »…
The effect amplified by eagles, zebras and tigers that roam through the blooming and the coloured crystals of dreams Marianne Garnier invites us to share.

Vincent Cartuyvels