Sabine Monirys moves along a path that only she knows. Her paintings resist interpretation. Contemplating them, one can only say: “This is how her spirit saw things”. And she had a lot of spirit, so we remain quiet.
She’s a wounded child who sets off with her wound, painting it so that it can heal. As I say this, I hear Hölderlin’s phrase: “Come! into the Open, Friend!”.
With Sabine Monirys, wound is a blessing.
Peter Handke
In her play of indeterminacy, Monirys turns to the moment held carefully hostage, time seized and presented. And yet, these too are Russian dolls, matryoshkas, which continuously conceal and reveal themselves through irony and play. She is named “Sabine”, however she evades the Greek myth of capture and conquest of this tribe of women, defying their victimhood through representations which highlight women’s fortitude through shape-shifting and fluidity. Streaming hair, a recurring motif in her work, prohibits identification and/or capture, and rapture, in a sense, lies elsewhere. Deriving from the Latin raptura (to seize), for Monirys, it is found in aesthetics and the very process of an image captured, yet unfolding unex- pectedly, which distinguishes it from Narrative Figuration’s ‘image-choc’ described by Gérard Gassiot-Talabot.Her paintings instead are coded with subjectivity, humor and immense humanity.
Rakhee Balaram