I existed in parallel

This piece belongs to the series Architecture of Human ties. Architecture of Human Ties (2025) investigates the invisible structures through which collective life takes shape. Drawing from geological strata and sedimentary formations, Marie-Chloé Duval treats painting as a form of excavation, exploring how memory, relationships, histories, and social systems accumulate, intersect, and become embedded over time. Duval constructs an imagined world where landscapes become metaphors for society. Architectural lines, planes, thresholds, and geometric forms suggest the structures humans build—systems that connect, organize, protect, include, and exclude. These constructed elements enter the landscape as interruptions: they shift perspective, cut through space, and disturb what initially appears familiar. Organic gestures and architectural forms coexist, creating environments that feel simultaneously inhabited and constructed. Working across oil paint and mixed media, each work operates as both terrain and proposition. Perspective is deliberately unsettled, asking: What are we seeing? What are we actually looking at? The landscape becomes a space in which perception can be questioned—where what appears real may simply be the reality we have learned to see. The series reflects Duval’s belief that reality is never entirely fixed or neutral; it is shaped by the structures, histories, and perspectives through which we experience it. Architecture of Human Ties therefore becomes an invitation to pause, look again, and reconsider the frameworks through which we understand our place in relation to one another.