Artist
Marianne Pon-Layus
About
July 3 to September 11, 2026
Espace Mur-mur des arts (1st floor of Bibliothèque Georgette-Lepage)
7855 San Francisco Avenue(itinerary)
- Monday to Friday: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Saturday and Sunday: 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Description
Marianne Pon-Layus’s exhibition Figures persistantes plunges us into imaginary worlds of pastel hues, sometimes soft, sometimes contrasting. The artist’s works are populated by bewitching, intriguing and sometimes hybrid female characters. Pon-Layus creates unheard-of, unusual figures by blending contemporary imagery with mythological symbolic codes.
About the artist
Marianne Pon-Layus lives and works in Montréal. With a master’s degree in visual and media arts from UQAM (2012), she has been developing a pictorial practice focused on the representation of the female body and the issues of power, identity and transformation that inhabit it for over a decade. Her work was initially built around self-representation, shown in several solo exhibitions in Quebec, notably at Galerie B-312, Maison de la culture Frontenac and Galerie d’art d’Outremont. These early works feature female figures from her own image, in pastel hues, oscillating between sensuality, wry humor and tension, revealing internal, fragmented relationships of domination.
Over the years, her practice has evolved towards a darker aesthetic, nourished by the imagination of horror and B-movie cinema. She explores symbolic metamorphoses and bodily transgressions in very large-format paintings on loose canvas, accentuating the immersive, physical character of her work. These works have been presented at the Maison des artistes visuels francophones de Winnipeg, the Institut culturel du Klondike and the McClure Gallery, among others.
Since 2020, her iconography has been inspired by images of assertive, powerful women – workers, scientists, leaders, heroines or mythical figures. Her free gestures combine rigor and spontaneity, using diluted acrylic paint and watercolors to create images that are at once seductive, unstable and ambivalent. Nurtured by residencies in Quebec, Sweden and Belgium, her practice questions appearance and its effects on the construction of identities, proposing figures open to multiple readings.
