Marylin Reim, text Doris Vasiloff, Parcours

Although her father is from Quebec, Marilyn Reim was born in New York. In a sense moving to Montreal repre-sented a return to her roots. It was in Montreal that she learned the art of sculpting stone, ceramic and bronze, as well as design and painting, at the "Institute des beaux-arts de Montreal" and the Saidye Bronfman Centre, where she developed a close friend-ship with her professor Marilyn Rubenstein. Reim, who considers the role of women in society and feminine solidarity of prime importance, frankly admits that her creative strength comes from the women she has met in her life. Over the course of the last five years she has con-centrated on oil, watercolor and mixed techniques on wood or paper. But what is of special interest in Reim's canvasses is the water color influence: although we might be looking at a painting in oil, we cannot overlook the luminescence and agility particular to works done in watercolor. Her drawing skills are also very apparent: fine lines cross the canvass like minuscule veins traced on the leaves of a plant.

Her solid nude technique is deeply felt. Although impressionistic and stylized, her corpulent, slightly hulking nudes are never overly heavy. Always evanes-cent, they become swollen forms, aerial and light, not rooted in the ordinary but rather in a dreamlike world populated by symbols and imprinted with lyricism. This visual lyricism, in its spiritual quest, is reminiscent of the works of Odilon Redon. The artist organizes her pictorial dream world with care. The canvas is painstakingly brushed with a kind of excessively careful execution that extends the vertical movement of the strokes laid on the canvas. Backgrounds are sometimes almost fluid, sometimes expressively colored. Then comes the engraving of the abundance of flowers and female personages who are the centre of Reim's work.

The artist depicts nude women with Etruscan faces, some with colored eyelids like Greek or Roman caryatids, soaring in sensuality, embalmed in a bath of flowers - an atmosphere of a garden of paradise. The women, rarely alone, occupy the entire canvass. Solidarity obliges this. Never gazing at the viewer, they seem rather, to be facing inward, peaceful and meditative. Reim also tries to install her landscapes of Laurentian scenery with this same sense of calm - they are places that inspire respect for all living creatures, places that we would all like to be. She constantly seeks a balance between her painting and her personal life, between the sponta-neous impulse to paint and the delicate decisions that must be made with a clear, cold mind.

How to prioritize between heavy textured brush strokes, fine lines, colors, densities, the organization of the canvas and the studied placement of her human subjects? These difficult choices may be constraining or even agonizing for the artist to make, but they are essential for attaining her goal: pictorial harmony and balance. And yet Marilyn Reim does not rely on rules that could inhibit her inner passion. "Oh no, never!" she replies with animation. For Reim passion, when properly contained, is an important stimulus for creating harmony. The challenge for her is not to step beyond the borders of painting.