ART AS
DHARMA RAIN
BIOGRAPHY
RENTAI CAROLINE MABY (b. 1973, France) is a contemporary artist whose pictorial research is rooted in a meditative discipline.
For her, painting is a practice of attention, in which nature, perception and compassion co-emerge within a single process. Her approach binds visual creation to a contemplative path, with no hierarchy between art and meditation.
For many years committed to the way of Zen, she received the name Rentai — 虹体, Rainbow Body. This name traces an orientation: that of a life in which color and painting appear as phenomena of attention.
Rentai Caroline Maby charts a singular and independent path, sustained by an inner discipline.
In her collaborative and transdisciplinary projects, art offers itself as a field of experience, of relation and of responsibility.
A commitment to protecting the living world and biodiversity runs through her practice, as does attention to the most vulnerable, born of her humanitarian experience. So does the desire to be a voice for peace. The interplay between artistic creation and compassion in action forms a continuum of exploration and presence. Her commissioned works arise from the same intention.
The ethic of care that runs through her painting extends beyond the studio into the association ELOVUTION she founded, devoted to art and art therapy for disadvantaged communities. This aspiration now unfolds at the hermitage HANAYAMA-an, from the silence and retreat intrinsic to her studio practice.
She lives and works in Saint-Malo, on the Emerald Coast, in Brittany (France).
© Pierrick Contin
STATEMENT
~ NATURE AS A FIELD OF EXPERIENCE AND EMERGENCE
The telluric force of the elements, the sea, heavy skies, and the northern light engage perception and pass through the gesture.
Animal voices, plant cycles, and celestial phenomena form a sensory continuum that informs intuition and opens onto what exceeds representation.
Painting, then, does not depict nature: it is one of its modalities.
It can be understood as a rain of phenomena, a constellation of appearances as it gives itself to attention.
Quae sursum volo videre*. On raw canvas and paper — bare spaces of the open — the work comes into being where intention and perception meet.
Creation is experienced as a process, in which each work crystallizes a moment.
In a breath that moves from gesture to contemplative sitting and from sitting back to gesture, drawing, painting, shodō, collage, writing, and photography unfold as practices of inquiry, in an attentive articulation where presence, matter, and form co-emerge.
The act of painting is meditation in action, carried by a movement of loving-kindness and service.
I seek to bring forth forms charged with intensity and meaning, as gestures of attention and compassion addressed to all that lives.
This vow, always unfinished, is the tacit intention that underlies my daily practice.
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* “ I want to see what is beyond. ”