Profile

For 40 years, Martine Rey's work, in perpetual movement, has explored space-time through urushi lacquer and the melancholy of objects dear to Japanese culture: Mono no aware.

The artist thus confronts a material whose application technique joins her own personal and artistic journey, that of patience and delicacy.

"I create objects that allow an emotional or even intimate bond between oneself and the object, an incessant quest for the lost object, and/or the one that has always been missing."

Martine Rey, a lacquer artist specializing in urushi vegetable lacquer, discovered this ancestral technique 40 years ago during her studies at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts in Japan, where she was trained by the master Shinkaï. This initiatory journey deeply influenced her artistic journey, revealing an intimate connection with Japanese culture. Since then, she has continued to reinvent this living material in her works.

After training in "European lacquer" at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris, she settled in Voiron, where she still lives and works today. In 1980, she founded the association LAC (Laqueurs Associés pour la Création), and taught vegetable lacquer at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et Métiers d'Art in Paris between 2002 and 2009. Her work is exhibited in France and abroad, and she has been selected several times for the Ishikawa Triennale. She has also been invited to the World Urushi Culture Council Symposium in Tokyo and to the International Fair of Lacquer and Painting Design in Ishikawa.

Far from limiting herself to the ornamentation of objects, Martine Rey uses urushi to transform ordinary objects into relics or talismans, revealing their history and hidden essence. Her approach is marked by an intimate connection with Japan and its aesthetics, notably the "poignant melancholy of things" (Mono no aware). Her creation is rooted in a quest for silent beauty, where the slowness and meticulousness of the lacquer technique mark the passage of time, making each gesture bearer of memory and sensitivity. For 40 years, she has explored this space-time, giving urushi lacquer all its depth and preciousness.

Martine Rey thus creates a shared space of discoveries and intimacies, a place where memories and gestures intertwine. This space unfolds through the multiple layers of lacquer, similar to palimpsests (manuscripts made of parchments reused after erasure of previous writings), deeply buried. Lacquer plays the role of witness to the passage of time, connecting the present to memory.

Martine Rey is represented by Galerie Sinople. A former resident of Villa Kujoyama, she is particularly sensitive to the transmission of her craft. She has a passion for Urushi lacquer.

She trains in kintsugi, the art of repairing wounds in the literal and figurative sense, using age-old techniques.