Photo: Tino Kukulies
Song of the Spirits Over the Water
“But if the gaze of things is somewhat gentle, somewhat solemn, somewhat pensive, it is the gaze of water.”
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams1
With Into the Blue, Marcel Dzama invites, perhaps even implores, viewers to look at the world differently. In the artist’s work, blue and water are not merely elements of the landscape; rather, they become a way of apprehending the world, a “gaze of water,” to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s words: a way of seeing, dreaming, and thinking. If blue water flows throughout this exhibition and, more broadly, through much of Dzama's work, it is also because it is profoundly connected to dreams, the imagination, and contemplation. For Gaston Bachelard, who wrote that "a single drop of water is enough to create a world,"2 water does not merely reflect the world; it is also a source of invention, creation, and transformation. Water dissolves the certainties of reality, opening up the realm of dreams. It is precisely this movement that seems to animate Marcel Dzama's drawings. Through his drawings and paintings, he creates small theatrical scenes in which our familiar world is subtly distorted and gently unsettled, transformed into a nocturnal universe oscillating between comfort and unease.
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1974, Marcel Dzama has established himself on the international art scene since the 1990s. He has developed an immediately recognizable artistic vocabulary: drawing equally on art history, particularly Surrealism, as on cinema and popular culture, from cabarets and Broadway shows to rock music and countless references to current events, Marcel Dzama composes bestiaries and theatrical tableaux in which the boundaries between reality and the subconscious are constantly blurred. Populated by hybrid creatures, costumed figures, and anthropomorphic animals, his universe weaves together the imagery of childhood, dreams, and the surreal. Beneath their apparent lightness, however, his works offer a profoundly critical reading of our time, where humour, fantasy, and strangeness become ways of questioning the violence, absurdities, and contradictions of the contemporary world.
Let the river answer
Marcel Dzama’s work is characterized by the recurring presence of human figures, which appear at times as characters, symbols, or metaphors. While these silhouettes have always been at the heart of his artistic universe, their surroundings have evolved over the years. In his early drawings, isolated figures emerged against vast, blank backgrounds, evoking the silent, snow-covered, sparsely inhabited landscapes of Winnipeg, where the artist grew up. Following his move to New York in 2004, his compositions gradually became denser: figures multiplied, scenes grew increasingly abundant, as if animated by the energy and vitality of the metropolis.
In this exhibition, a new element gradually begins to permeate the world of Marcel Dzama's drawings and paintings: water. It spreads across the backgrounds of works from series such as Blue Sunday, Blue Monday, and Yer Blues, as well as in the more overtly titled drawing Mother Came from the Ocean (2025). Yet water is never merely a backdrop or a monochrome surface; above all, it is a living material, a space of depth, absorption, and transformation.
The color blue itself carries a rich emotional resonance. In English, the expression to feel blue refers to a state of sadness or melancholy, echoing the emotional resonance of the blues in music. Blue also evokes vastness, distance, and silence: states of being that invite contemplation. In Marcel Dzama's work, these emotional associations give rise to a rich subaquatic world in which life proliferates. In Rebel Girl (2025), fish and birds inhabit the river; in Rebellion, Dance and Resistance (2025), dancers appear to float upon the water's surface; in The male sea horse endures the privilege of children, a family of seahorses is portrayed, while in Blue Sunday (2026), figures gradually delve into the depths of the ocean, surrounded by banks of fish slipping through the dark, nocturnal waters.
As the Argentine writer and poet Gloria Alcorta once wrote, "Moving water carries within it the heartbeat of a flower"3 Marcel Dzama likewise seems to associate the movement of water with an entire organic and fantastical world. The boundaries between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes gradually dissolve. His figures appear to merge with their surroundings, dissolving into the aquatic depths until they become one with them, in a near future where rising waters have reshaped the world and submerged humanity in an endless blue, as his drawing Songs after the flood suggests. Water thus emerges less as a natural element than as the embodiment of a new harmony between humanity and nature, a realm in which these characters may be absorbed into the depths, ultimately becoming one with the cosmos.
Dance to the end of gravity
It is also since his arrival in New York, and notably through his discovery of Broadway shows, that Marcel Dzama gradually began to incorporate dance and choreography into his drawings. He recounts having come across, almost by chance, a stack of vintage dance magazines in Brooklyn4: the poses of the ballerinas appeared to him as a way of organizing the surrounding noise, structuring the incessant movement of the city, and bringing order to the chaos of the world.
In this exhibition, dance is intimately connected to the force of gravity and weight. Floating above the water, suspended between sky and sea, or lying like aquatic dancers upon the surface of the water, the bodies, through dance, suspend time and offer another perspective on a society, particularly that of New York, that pulses with life. Dance is also a celebration of joy and of the world itself. Marcel Dzama thus draws upon an entire imaginary universe: that of Matisse’s dancers, for instance, but also that of the music that accompanies these festive moments, notably through his series of guitar drawings, which evoke the works of Picasso, or his drawing “I love song for a worried world” depicting cats playing music. The words of Federico García Lorca also come to mind: “He who dances walks on water and inside a flame.” Dance emerges as a fragile balance between the body and the elements, while also offering a way to venture into unexpected territories, to resist conventions, and to open new possibilities of perception and experience.
“I hold the flow of the river like a violin,” wrote Paul Éluard in Le Livre ouvert.5 In his own way, Marcel Dzama brings water together with an entire imaginary world associated with it: its sound, its musicality, its slowness, its movement, its weightlessness. Water thus becomes a space where music and dance can enter into dialogue, within a nocturnal world that is at once gentle and joyful. Paradoxically, dance and music are not only forms of celebration: they also take shape within a nocturnal universe, both unsettling and conducive to reverie. Recalling the medieval Danse Macabre, they hover between joy and death, eros and thanatos, offering a melancholic meditation on the necessity of embracing life in all its fleetingness. [...]
Excerpt from a text by Jérôme Sans
The full text will be published in the exhibition catalogue.
- Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. 1942.
- Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. 1942.
- Gloria Alcorta, Visages, 1952.
- Rachel Corbett, “Dancing to the Death” in Marcel Dzama: Tonight We Dance, exh. cat., Tampere: Sara Hildén Art Museum, 2021.
- Paul Éluard, The Open Book, 1940.
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