In Fever Nights, Maya Weishof presents two large paintings that were made in the last few months of her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. The show is accompanied by an interview between the artist and Jérôme Sans.

The two works on display, The Magical Circle (2022) and Febril (2022), are hung opposite one another, thereby limiting the audience circulation in the exhibition space. However, instead of enclosing the environment, the canvases function as mirrors that reflect one another and create windows—or portals—to landscapes that are both bucolic and apocalyptic.

Drawing from a vast repertoire of images—ranging from art history, architectural manuals, illuminated manuscripts from the Renaissance and Medieval eras to cartoons—Maya’s latest research focuses on depictions of fear and how it can be shown on the body, especially in those found in representations of the apocalypse. As a result, these initially bucolic scenes, which resemble those of Fauvism in their lush approach to color and form, become the verge of either a terrible or a fantastic event. Or, perhaps, both.

The twilight, seen in the paintings, not only announces the night, but brings with it the entire western culture’s imagery of the night. The result is images that highlight both the dangers and the pleasures of the night: the oneiric and the shadowing of reason; the magical creatures; but also the monsters that lurk in the shadows.

The thematic explorations are followed by a different treatment of the pictorial surface by Weishof. In the scenes depicted, there is a spatial amplification not yet seen at large in the artist's production, and the frames painted directly on the canvas open to vast landscapes of distant horizons in which characters inhabit different planes. At the same time, the melting of shapes and boundaries; the vivid colors and fiery gestures, which give the feverish aspect to her work, also find room for experimentation in the current stage of Maya Weishof's practice.