ACCUMULATION OF HORIZONS | Paris, 2025
A map and a portal:
When the paintings of Maya Gelfman
and Christophe Souques hang in sequence, they unroll into a horizon that repeatedly remakes itself. Gelfman’s canvases teem with marks gathered directly from the places she inhabits;
Souques’ muted surfaces open onto a depth
held in suspension. Together they draw us
into a liminal zone — a necessary pause in a world saturated with information, images, and point of views. An in-between space where the wild and the rigorous, the audible and the hushed, negotiate a tentative balance.
Gelfman’s practice traces its lineage to the Fluxus movement and action painting. The way her works develop and change during their creation also recall the cartographic wanderings of land art.
Working nomadically, she “samples” color, sound, and gesture specific to each site, weaving them
into dense topographies that evoke both medieval mappae mundi and contemporary psychogeography. Her newest, two‑meter canvases remain intimate: each line tracks a breath, a footstep, a moment of listening. The result is a living archive of impermanence — echoing, after Agnes Martin,
the quiet discipline of daily perception.
Christophe Souques’ square-format works emerge from the evidence of an act without reason, arising solely from the creative force. He invites us not to search for meaning, but to dwell in the act of waiting, of contacting inner vitality, of offering. The sculptural reliefs are particularly striking. Affixed to the lower centre, these sculptural portals are made in wood, painted in oil, pigment and ash.
This gesture opens a new interpretive space:
not only a formal punctuation, but a metaphysical suggestion of passage, skyline as portal, time as threshold. The lone figurines, created in enigmatic shapes, anchor the field of the compositions, evoking the material humility of Arte Povera
and the spiritual minimalism of Mark Rothko or Yun Hyong‑keun. What first appears as emptiness, gradually thickens into tactile silence.
While Gelfman and Souques differ in approach -
her work is improvisational and processual, his is deliberate and distillatory - somehow both artists arrive at similar conclusions. Gelfman’s surfaces, though chaotic and wild, are unified by movement that establishes and resolves order. Souques’ are calm and employ restraint to explore expansive states of being. Both practices are simultaneously busy and still, accumulating detail while inviting contemplation. Together, they define a horizon
not as an edge or a limit, but as a permeable membrane through which perception shifts, broadens, and deepens.
Gelfman and Souques suggest two ways of entering the same field: that liminal zone between sense
and spirit, between place and possibility —
a passage toward what escapes us and yet persists. Without being religious, but profoundly spiritual in their approach, this liminalism1 offers a new path: that of an art that connects, soothes,
and opens to expanded states of consciousness.
It is not about producing for the sake of producing, nor about seducing with the spectacular,
but about creating passages, “limens”,
between the visible and invisible worlds,
between external noise and internal silence.
~ Curatorial text by Jemma Elliott‑Israelson
Souques has articulated these ideas in his Liminalist Manifesto, which sets forth the principles of this passage-oriented practice:
art that opens cracks in perception, restores feeling over reaction, and seeks presence without doctrine.
LIMINALIST MANIFESTO, for an art of threshold, shadow, and presence.
1. Presence as passage.
Liminalism is the art of passage. It doesn’t describe, it doesn’t tell, it doesn’t shout. It opens. It creates cracks in perception, suspended moments where something expanded can be sensed.
2. Relinquishing the "machine-man".
Liminalism restores the spirit, and rehabilitates "aliveness". It is not about over thinking, but about feeling more. Sensing instead of reacting. Observing rather than imposing. Noticing instead of controlling. It seeks to free the mind and release any contrived reflexes.
3. Not religious. Spiritual, yes.
Liminalism does not preach. It does not claim to be a therapy. It acknowledges what human beings can experience — a vast capacity to experience without dogma. It recognizes the immensity of the human experience without reducing it to a system or belief.
4. The hand does not manufacture.
The creative gesture, craftsmanship, matter itself are places of consciousness. Liminalism facilitates a slow, grounded process as essential means to creation. Far from the "click" and removed from speed, that is where it happens.
5. Silence is the tool.
Emptiness, absence. The margins are not a side note, nor they are a lack— they are wholeness, they are full. Liminalism works with them and through them.
6. Art is not a product.
Liminalism proposes an experience — its own experience. It calls for neither performance nor spectacle. What matters is what it awakens.
7. An art of the threshold.
The liminalist keeps vigil. They act as witnesses between two worlds. They open zones of listening — spaces that sometimes seem invisible, but are very much there. Gaps between the mental noise and what might be called “presence”.