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 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” site‑specific colour, sound and gesture, weaving them into dense topographies that recall both medieval mappae mundi and contemporary psychogeography. 
Her newest, two‑metre 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, solely from the creative force. At their core, bare forms resonate like primordial relics. Souques calls us not to search for meaning, but to dwell in the act of waiting, of offering. These works become a passage toward what escapes us, and yet persists. The sculptural reliefs seen in both his All Sides and Offrande’s series seen 
in this exhibition are particularly striking. Affixed to the lower centre, these sculptural portals are made i
n 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 and act as thresholds, 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.

In Gelfman’s In the Slow Exhale of the Tide, a strong green base of coloured strokes stretch horizontally across the canvas, flecked with hot pink, bright yellow, and white. The eye is pushed backward and forward across its expanse, navigating a field where physicality and time intertwine. Etched lines and scraped grooves reveal the artist’s process of working through visual problems directly on the surface, mapping both space and thought. This mapping is further shaped by her deep connection to her environment: 
the ever-changing light and horizon lines in Montolieu, Aude subtly guide her choice of tone, gesture, 
and rhythm. The painting becomes not only a record of place but of light’s modulation across time.

Compare this to Christophe Souques’s All Sides 3, a chartreuse composition carefully framed in graduated tones. The square of higher pigment concentration at its centre is surrounded by a darker border, subtly echoing the structure of a horizon and its layered gradations. While Gelfman’s method relies on time-based layering; waiting for one stratum to dry before superimposing another, Souques works within the same tonal field, building density through variation and restraint. Textural grooves emerge from thick impasto, contrasting Gelfman’s scraped incisions; both artists leave traces of their hand, but in Souques’s case the repetition evokes silence rather than urgency. The grooves on the relief mirror those etched into Gelfman’s layers, forming a visual echo between the two practices. In this series, Souques introduces the notion of accumulations of horizons, where rest and movement become one. Colour and material, in layers of oil and ash, make the surface feel light. These works invite a state of clarity, where the mind loosens, disengaging from fixed points of view.

Gelfman’s Seemingly Disappearing Yet Never Out of Sight  shifts its orientation with a vertical thrust. Swathed in pink columns, the painting is punctuated at the centre by a dark green swirl of marks that 
spiral upward. Small pink and black circles hover in the middle, lower left, and upper right quadrants, complicating the otherwise columnar movement. Gelfman’s meditative, even trance-like practice is clear 
in the rhythm of this painting. 

A formal echo can be found in Souques’s Offrandes 5 , where a dusty rose centre square is framed by a brighter pink faded border and a dusty brown-rose outer band. The relief in this piece, painted geometric forms in red, green, yellow, sour and pink, anchors the composition. Both works are simultaneously busy and still, accumulating detail while inviting contemplation. This meditative approach deepens in Souques’s Offrandes series where the materials of the canvas and sculptural figure composed of geometric forms with red, green, yellow, blue and pink panels merge together as quiet offerings. 

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. Together, they define a horizon not as an edge or limit, but as a permeable membrane, one through which perception shifts, expands, and deepens.

Gelfman and Souques suggest two ways of entering this field: through the act of passing. Without being religious, but deeply spiritual in their approach, this Liminalism 1 offers a new path: that of an art that connects, soothes, and opens up to broader 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. 
In this sense, Liminalism is not only an artistic movement, but an act of poetic resistance: a call for reconciliation between humans and their own nature.

Both Gelfman and Souques make work deeply rooted in their environments: Gelfman in Montolieu, Occitanie, drawing from light, wind, and terrain; Souques in Chalabre, Occitanie, attuned to seasonal rhythms and elemental cycles. Their practices may differ, but each offers us entry into the same field: that liminal zone between sense and spirit, between place and possibility.

Curatorial Text: Jemma Elliott-Israelson

Maya Gelfman (b. 1978, based in France and USA) From painting to installation, performance to street‑art, Gelfman uses her body to explore transformation, fragility, resilience, beauty and decay. Her practice is immersive and deliberately spontaneous: brushstrokes synchronise with breath, footsteps set the metronome for line, colours surface from landscape, season and time of day. Rooted in somatic techniques and informed by Fluxus, action painting, improvisation theory and meditation, every canvas is made in situ and in tempo, a cartography of impermanence. A childhood heart surgery and near‑death experience at four forged her embodied understanding of ephemerality; that urgency still fuels the total commitment of her studio and public work. Since earning a BA at Shenkar Art Academy (2006) she has mounted eleven solo exhibitions, including at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (2024), and the Thailand National Gallery (2017).She completed six international residencies (including SAPH, China, and Windgate, USA) and appeared in dozens of group shows worldwide, most recently the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). Her works reside in international collections, private and public, including Lettenmayer & partners, Rivka Saker, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Milu Hotel, and Zuckerman Museum of Art. Beyond the white cube she co‑founded Mind the Heart! (2009), an urban art project that has reached over a hundred cities in five continents. She delivered a TEDx talk on intentional practice (2013), and undertook The Serendipity Experiment (2017‑21): a 100,000‑km performance across North America, committed to “saying yes”, 
the first rule of Improv Theory.

Christophe Souques (b. 1971, based in Occitanie, France) Nourished by sources ranging from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism and non‑academic arts, Souques positions himself at the crossroads of contemporary abstraction and humble, modest art. His practice, neither strictly abstract nor figurative investigates the relations of material, form and time, integrating symbolically charged substances such as ash. Inspired by Eastern philosophies and phenomenology, he seeks a pictorial field where chaos and order coexist. Souques showed early interests in drawing, photography and video, but after an economics degree he chose a non‑academic path, joining a Lyon collective in 1996. Two years later he co‑founded the SCARECROW movement with painter‑philosopher Mirsad Hadzikaric; their manifesto Beauty Without Elegance rejected flattering art and advocated “captured agitation.” 
In 2005 he established a studio in Gassin; the gallerist Charles Zalber exhibited his work at the Grand Palais in 2006 alongside Basquiat, Picasso and Tàpies. Following Zalber’s death in 2012, Souques travelled in Asia and the Middle East, studying meditative and martial practices, and produced the Black and Gold series during commissions in Sweden, California and Morocco. The van‑based project SOS - Spirit of Sharing (2019) carried his work across Europe, culminating in collaborations with André Simoncini in Luxembourg. Since 2022 he has refocused on large‑format paintings and multimedia installations integrating video and sound, continuing to develop what he terms Liminalism.