Born in 1967 in what was then the Soviet satellite of East Germany, Maren Ruben presents the second stage in her ÉTAT D’AMOUR FRAGMENTÉ (Fragmented State of Love) project. After PISSENLIT. HERBES TROUBLANTES (Bedwetter. Disturbing Herbs), now is the turn of L’EXIL DE L’IMAGINAIRE (The Exile of Imagery), with which the artist, who now lives and works in France, offers us her reflections about unconditional love in general and its interferences. But this artist does not restrict her message to a discussion of feelings related to issues of the heart. What Ruben offers us here is a sort of reflection about the state of the meta-contemporary world’s health, in which the individual’s relationship with the social group is subjected to the fragmentation of a society that struggles to recognise humanist pride as an inevitable element of a society with a strong sense of identity and a healthy dose of self-regard. While her experience bears witness to the fundamental changes that took place in the twentieth century, it now observes the many and varied evolutions for which an unlikely form may be sought and that personify the weaknesses and fragilities of a generation that puts all its desperate trust in the digital universe.

Ruben is a healthy carrier of her cultural experience in Communist East Germany, interspersing her positive memories of a society that believed in and personified the values of social sharing with the paradoxes of an apparently cultured and progressive, but terribly fragile and internally fragmented western society. Between reality, in other words her awareness of fragmented sentiment, and her dream of the exiled imagery, the artist constantly uses her artistic practice to question her inner themes, while maintain their profound bonds, as her journey of the heart and of the soul takes place, step by step, as she “forges” her art and generates productive models, employing a cautious choice of delicate, almost ephemeral materials, such as the use of certain types of paper collected in the course of countless travels to many different parts of the globe, above all in Asia. And that is how the oneiric – or maybe it would be better described as the visionary – element automatically replaces meta reality to become a vision of imagery, so not a virtual world, the real cancer that nowadays affects and mystifies even politics and geopolitics.

Ruben neither develops nor makes a show of a militant language, nor even of a feminist one as she uses her art as a visual syntax or grammar, but actually tackles the eternal theme of the mise à nu within an endless process of production that is almost performative or scriptural. The delicacy of this endless or truly never-ending approach makes its narration, or the narration of the id, not just real, but true, and resistant to artificial models.

Mario Casanova, 2025.
Translated by Pete Kercher

Maren Ruben (1967), Born on the right time one, 2022. Watercolor on Japanese Washi paper, cotton thread, cotton gauze, starch glue, 59 x 28 cm (each), ca 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist.