DUMONTEIL is pleased to open its new year with Inner Life, Shaping Worlds, the solo exhibition of the French artist Tamaris BORRELLY. This is the first solo exhibition in China by this emerging European artist, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris. The exhibition features 20 latest watercolor creations by the artist, including several large-format works, showcasing how the artist transcends all forms of life and weaves them into an other-worldly dreamscape.

These lines, the first of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", soon come to mind as one delves into the myriad of creatures that populate the carefully collected sheets implemented by Tamaris Borrelly. For paper, her chosen formats never appear monumental – not overpowering, nor overhanging. Still, they are vast, we immerse ourselves in them to the point of loss, with delight.

Nothing here seems fixed in place and circulation is in order, as in animist cults, like “Au Temps d’harmonie” painted by Paul Signac, before the separations and borders between beings, kingdoms and cultures, beyond sharing between reality and dreams also.

This is because everything mixes or fits in these vast and colorful expanses, intensely populated by elements that are just as much ornamental as symbolic: the rife vegetation evokes the Paradise of “Hortus conclusus (enclosed gardens)” where the Virgin was represented during the Middle Ages; in addition to the wallpapers of Arts & Crafts and the manner in which space is woven, it reminds us of the Millefleurs style in tapestries, their plant seedlings, and their animals, real or fantastic.

At the root of such spaces; there is an imagination nourished by everything, which like color or light, has no dimensions therefore no limits, where boundless possibilites arise, as if holding the world in a page, to reform it far from menacing dangers, by exhibiting nothing less than an image of infinity.