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. The interplay between artistic creation and compassion in action forms a continuum of exploration and presence.
The ethic of care that runs through her painting extends beyond the studio, both into the association ELOVUTION she founded, devoted to art and art therapy for disadvantaged communities, and into the hermitage HANAYAMA-an she created.
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 northern light, engages perception and traverses the gesture.
Animal voices, vegetal cycles, and celestial phenomena form a sensory continuum that informs intuition and opens to what exceeds representation.
Within this field, painting is not a representation of nature, but a modality of nature itself.
Painting is thus understood as a rain of phenomena, a field of appearances as it gives itself within attention.
Quae sursum volo videre*. On raw canvas and paper — bare spaces of openness — the work manifests as a phenomenon, where intention and perception meet. Creation appears as a process rather than an expression.
When pictorial gestures alternate with contemplative sitting, drawing, painting, shodō, collage, writing, and photography unfold as practices of research, in an attentive articulation where presence, matter and form co-emerge.
The act of painting is a meditation in action, animated by an ethics of care and service.
I seek to manifest forms bearing intensity and meaning, as gestures of attention and compassion, addressed to the living.
This vow, always unfinished, is the tacit intention that underlies my daily practice.
--
* “ I want to see what is beyond. ”