La vie dans les Os, (Life in the Bones), i.e. life as a raw material and the bones as an emblem.
This is what Odile Maarek, both artist and geneticist, loves analyzing. Just like an alchemist, she studies, gropes around, deciphers the mystery of life, crossing the flesh, coming and going constantly between what appears and what is behind.
To make the invisible visible: the artist compares endlessly and interweaves the paradoxes in order to grip what is happening between body and mind, to examine what is hiding behind appearances, to get closer to the matter of living, to decode the interface between life and the world, inside and outside, present and origin.

La Vie dans les Os, or how to reveal what is intimate beyond suspicion.
Odile Maarek’s creative process is based on this idea, with a story of the body between the lines. Using the support as an evocation of matter, her previous work brought in plastic, tracing or rice paper making the layers, the superimpositions and the bone structure appear. What is intrinsic get confessed, that is to say what is concealed as divulged by the artist herself in her recent series on female sex –sex that we don’t see.

Her recent work using watercolours perpetuates this exploration of the bone as a reverse of the flesh; Odile Maarek makes the most of the techniques by using her translucence as well as the porosity of the paper to bring us face to face with the representation of femininity as represented in western societies. In this screening of invisibility, Odile Maarek observes, searches, takes a stand on these contemporary vanities.

La Vie dans les Os,OdileMaarek’s first exhibition at ADDICT Galerie, presents dead-like icons with prominent bones that haunt magazines, posters and podiums. But apart from that, what do these girls offer? Even if the bones make them alive, they reveal these icons fragile and mortal as well. They are supposed to represent femininity, but they turn into Vanity, as they carry themselves to their own death. OdileMaarek mocks at the opposition between this solid and internal structure - the bones – and the evanescence that characterizes the picture, beauty and fashion. If in the traditional imagery, the bone is associated to death, the artist says the opposite because according to her, it becomes the most evident representation of life: it comes to life endlessly, builds the architecture of our body, and remains as an object, meanwhile the time passes by. It is renewing perpetually in its apparent rigidity, and reinserts lives into these bony figures.
If these previous researches have highlighted radiology of the mind (“the analytic dormitory” a series on the couch topic), the bone is chosen here for its ontological physical and palpable essence. But Odile Maarek also works on its sensual characteristic when it sticks up like some deep feelings that animate us, and becomes sculpture of desire. As she loves saying, she depicts “a bone erected like a stick of life, an axis condensed by our desire of verticality.”

La Vie dans les Os, between anatomic treaty and pop version of x-rays, makes the imperceptible dawn. Odile Maarek persists in her crossing of appearances to reach a projection of the breath of life, by coming and going endlessly from the shape to its reverse. If according to Paul Valéry, “what has the deepest dimension in the man is the skin”, Odile Maarek is pleased withgetting from the bones, their substantive marrow.