ART AS
DHARMA* RAIN
BIOGRAPHY
RENTAI** CAROLINE MABY (b. 1973, France) is a contemporary artist whose painting practice is grounded in a meditative discipline.
In her work, painting unfolds as a practice of attention, where nature, perception, and compassion co-emerge as a process. Her approach connects pictorial creation and contemplative research, without hierarchy between art and meditation.
She develops collaborative and transdisciplinary artistic projects, considering art as a field of experience, relation, and responsibility.
A commitment to the protection of the living and biodiversity runs through her practice, as does an attention to children’s rights, stemming from her humanitarian experience. The interaction between artistic creation and social action forms a continuum of research and engagement.
Rentai Caroline Maby is currently dedicated to painting, contemplative study, and the direction of the association ELOVUTION, which she founded to promote art and art therapy among underprivileged communities, particularly in the Himalayan region.
She lives and works in Saint-Malo, on the Emerald Coast, Brittany, France
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* Here, Dharma is conceived as a field of attention and ethical orientation, within which painting unfolds as a phenomenon.
** Rentai is Caroline Maby’s artist name and Dharma name, received in the Sōtō Zen lineage during Jukai (lay ordination). It designates an orientation of contemplative research and practice.
© 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.
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* “ I want to see what is beyond. ”