French artist Laure Mary emerges from the ashes of adversity with a powerful exhibition, ‘It All Begins When It Ends’ opening at Richard Heller gallery in Los Angeles on February 22. This collection of paintings is Mary’s courageous response to surviving domestic violence, channeling her experience into a deeply moving body of work. It gives voice to an experience often shrouded in silence: the aftermath of trauma. The creation of this show is intertwined with Mary’s own process of healing, each artwork marking a step forward.
Through a surreal lens, Mary’s dreamlike scenes capture fragmented memories and psychological disorientation. Mary’s paintings include for the first time ‘blue moons’ with exaggerated crevices. These serve as metaphors for a romanticized reality, reflecting our tendency to find beauty even in suffering. The moon, as we know it, is a celestial protector, and here symbolizes the artist’s inner strength and guidance, leading her through darkness. Stars, depicted as shooting stars, emit light that reaches us with a time gap due to the vast distances that separate them from us, much like contemporary art can challenge our immediate understanding and require time for its meaning to fully unfold.
Echoing the tradition of Vanitas popularized in the 17th century, Mary’s paintings offer a contemporary twist. Her Still Life paintings chronicle her unique journey through recovery. Psychological distress can manifest in many ways, including depersonalization, a state where the mind disconnects from the body. This detachment is represented through spectral figures that haunt Mary’s canvases, embodying the fragmentation of identity and the invisible wounds. These specters serve as poignant reminders of the dehumanizing effects and the struggle to reclaim one’s sense of self. The unconscious is a separate entity residing within us, a constant source of internal conflict. As French-Poet Rimbaud wrote, ‘I is another.’ We cannot perform our lives, our true selves will inevitably break through, like tattered wallpaper that reveals the layers hidden beneath its surface in the painting titled ‘Me is another’.
Profile picture by: Adam Bienkowski
Gallery / exhibition text by: Lisa Boudet
Interview by: Rubén Palma.

The last time we published an interview with you, it was done by Lisa Boudet. That was back in February of 2024. What have you been up to since then?
Laure: That’s right, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lisa Boudet again, as she did me the honour of writing the text for my next exhibition. It’s always a pleasure to work with her. Since last year, I’ve been extremely focused on this new exhibition, immersing myself in the studio and investing myself in this project, which was particularly close to my heart.

Ok Laure, let’s talk about your upcoming show! This exhibition is deeply personal, stemming from your own experience of surviving domestic violence. At what point did you know that you wanted to translate this trauma into art?
Laure: It took quite a long time for me to decide to do it. When I first started thinking about it, I went round in circles a lot, making several attempts that weren’t very conclusive because I couldn’t quite grasp how I wanted to approach the subject. Then it started to take shape in proportion to the evolution of my recovery, my vision and my decisions becoming more and more precise, the dialogue with the universe that I’d already had before finally finding its agreement.

How did the process of creating these paintings contribute to your healing journey?
Laure: Firstly, the shock of violence causes a huge deal of physical and psychological damage. When you suffer a trauma, your brain switches off, i.e. it literally leaves you because it knows it’s in danger – it’s a survival instinct. During this period, your memory malfunctions, the information in your brain is mixed up and parts are lost, like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. So you’re living in confusion and distress.
My healing process began with therapies to help find these absent pieces. It’s exhausting and painful work. However, I immersed myself in the journey of my life, remembering moments, places, conversations and even sensations that reappeared on the surface of the present in which I found myself. I made a lot of notes in a notebook, and sometimes I also sketched a few images that came to me instinctively. It was this work that enabled me to create the paintings in this exhibition, and the more I painted, the better I felt. You could say that my work helped me in the healing process, and that my healing process nourished my work. The two were intimately linked.

The show’s title, ‘It All Begins When It Ends,’ suggests a cycle of transformation. What does this phrase mean to you?
Laure: During my healing process, there was one phrase that I kept repeating to the professionals who helped me heal: ‘I want to go back to being what I was before’. Because after all of that I was in a pretty critical state, I didn’t recognise myself any more, I felt like a ghost wandering around with no idea of where I’d come from or where I was going. The dehumanisation you undergo makes you lose all reference points.
And the answer to that sentence was always the same: ‘You’re not going to go back to being who you were, you’re going to become better. It was a long time before I understood that sentence. Then I came to understand that the strength and energy you exert are so powerful that somewhere along the line, you discover yourself. So, in order for things to begin, other things first had to come to an end, so that a new cycle could exist.

You’ve mentioned that your studio became a sanctuary. Can you describe what that space means to you and how it shaped this body of work?
Laure: Artists have a strong relationship with their studio. It’s a place where they can express themselves freely, where mistakes can be made, and where everything can be created from there. The studio is the artist’s safe place.
When people ask me how I managed to get by, I always reply that it was thanks to my work. No matter what I went through, I kept coming back to the studio. It was a vital need. Being an artist is undoubtedly the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and even in the face of the greatest difficulties, what I wanted to save above all else, even above myself, were my paintings. The studio has become a refuge, an ally. I exist in my studio.

Your introduction of ‘blue moons’ with exaggerated crevices is intriguing. Can you elaborate on their significance and how they relate to your own emotional landscape?
Laure: The moon is the earth’s natural satellite, and the craters that cover it are due to the many impacts it has received. I often thought about this magnificent celestial object that constantly watches over us, and I regularly drew parallels with the different parts of me that have fragmented. The moon allows us to step back and take a meditative view of the situations and trials we go through, because even if they leave their mark, they will always retain their poetic beauty. It is a symbol of hope and resilience.

Stars appear as shooting stars in your work, with their light reaching us after a delay—much like the way trauma can take time to process. Was this an intentional parallel, and how do you see time functioning in your paintings?
Laure: Once again, the stars are a reasoning process that began with my rediscovered memory. I remembered the philosophical text by Giorgio Agamben that I loved to read during my studies, ‘What is the Contemporary’, with this passage that said: ‘(…) it is the inactuality, the anachronism that allows us to grasp our time in the form of a ‘too early‘ that is also a ‘too late’, of an ‘already’ that is also a ‘not yet‘. And, at the same time, to recognise in the darkness of the present the light that, without ever being able to reach us, is perpetually travelling towards us.
The starlight we perceive from Earth is light years ahead of us. Sometimes we even look up at a star that no longer exists. To look at the sky is to travel through time. Contemporary art and trauma are much the same thing. On the one hand, an exhibition is the result of a production that was made in the past; in short, the work in the studio is the star, and the exhibition is the light that we perceive. Post-traumatic stress disorder gives you what I call ‘flashes’, where you relive past scenes in an instant. It’s not the same thing as a memory, a ‘flash’ is a mental departure into an event, as if you were traveling through time, and while it’s happening to you, you remain as if petrified in the present. The stars represent all these things.

There’s a strong Vanitas influence in your Still Life paintings. How do you reinterpret this historical genre to reflect contemporary themes of trauma and healing?
Laure: Vanitas evokes the ephemeral nature of life and the fragility of material things. Trauma exists on the borderline between the fragile and the solid. On the one hand, life itself is endangered, and on the other, hope prevents it from perishing.
When you are in the process of healing, you realise the emptiness of things, you have to concentrate on what is really important to you, what your priorities are. You do a lot of introspection, and you meditate a lot on every detail of existence. You have a very detailed vision, and that’s what enables you to move forward, and that’s the dialogue that has developed between this artistic movement and my work.

You incorporate spectral figures to represent depersonalization and the fragmentation of identity. Do these figures represent specific emotions or stages in your recovery?
Laure: The spectral figures came about as a result of a number of reflections. Firstly, there’s the dehumanization you experience when someone is violent towards you, the fact that you’re treated like an object rather than a human being.
There’s also the state you’re in after the event, and this state can last for a very long time – for my part, I can talk about months, even years. You’re wandering around the world without really being there, you don’t even know who you are or where you’re going, and you hardly feel anything anymore.
There’s also the lack of understanding, and even compassion, that you receive when you talk about it. You feel a detachment, a distancing that you often find hard to understand. The ghost or spectre is something that is there without really being there, and whose motives have yet to be determined. It’s also something that you leave behind. On a more general note, I’ve always liked to work on the imperceptible and the in-between. I like to represent subjects that don’t have a precise definition, which allows me to incorporate several readings, and to leave the viewer free to incorporate his or her own story.

Your work blends surrealism and psychological introspection. Are there any artists, writers, or movements that have influenced this series in particular?
Laure: Dorothea Tanning is an artist I admire enormously and who inspires me a great deal. But also Giorgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Louise Bourgeois and Séraphine de Senlis. I read a lot of Kafka during the production of this exhibition, and I’ve also started reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and there’s a book that I particularly like, Le royaume de l’Artifice by Céleste Olalquiaga, one of whose paintings has the same title as this one – a nod from me to her book, which I’ve had with me for over 10 years. And of course I’m an unconditional fan of David Lynch, and Mulholland Drive is a film I watch very regularly.

You’re donating proceeds from ‘The Safe Place’ to Solidarité Femmes. What role did this organization play in your journey, and why was it important to give back through your art?
Laure: Solidarité Femmes is one of the charities that helped me. It’s a listening service that gives you moral support and guides you towards appropriate solutions. I felt it was essential to donate the entire price of one of the paintings in the exhibition to them, because with this money, women and children who are victims of violence, and who unfortunately have no money to get out of these situations, will be able to be helped. It’s also a way for me to thank them for everything they’ve done for me, and to spread about this association, because unfortunately I’ve noticed that very often victims of violence don’t always know who they can turn to.

What conversations do you hope this exhibition sparks, both within the art world and among survivors of domestic violence?
Laure: Firstly, I hope to raise awareness, because violence is something that everyone knows about, or at least has some idea of. But little is known about the devastating consequences of trauma. There’s also the close link between the artist’s creation and the artist’s life, which is interesting, because it bears witness to contemporary issues and problems, and highlights his status as a human being who can’t escape the mythology that shapes him. I also hope that it will help victims of violence – and I’m talking here about all forms of violence – not to lose hope and to keep talking about it. I’ve often heard that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but the reality is that you will be haunted by a form of shame for the rest of your life. Denying this feeling is just another way of silencing you. I’m an artist, my job is to express myself.

Art can often serve as both personal catharsis and social commentary. Do you see your work as a form of activism?
Laure: Whether personally or professionally, nothing can ever be the same again. Doing this exhibition was a real ordeal. Today I’m happy and even proud to be able to talk about this subject, however difficult it may be. The trauma of violence is unfortunately timeless and universal. As long as the world is not at peace, this subject cannot be ignored. I’d be the happiest person in the world if one day I could say to you ‘oh, the consequences of the trauma of violence, but that’s no longer topical, it doesn’t concern anyone now’.
Looking back at this body of work, is there one painting that feels particularly significant or difficult for you?
Laure: The whole exhibition means a lot to me. I started the first painting a year and a half ago, and the last one was finished in January this year. So it’s quite a broad time span that brings together different phases. But I wouldn’t say that they seem difficult, I look at them and say to myself that despite all that, I’ve managed to achieve something. And if that creates an emotion, then that will be a real victory for me.
If you could send a message to your past self—the version of you that was still trapped in the cycle of violence—what would you say?’
Laure: I’ll tell her that she did exactly the right thing, because she did what she could.
Last question. What do you hope visitors take away from ‘It All Begins When It Ends’?
Laure: That it’s only the beginning