Galerie SLP presents LIVING, a duo exhibition bringing together French-Martiniquais painter Thomas de la Rozière and German abstract painter Marika Thoms. Exploring two distinct strategies for human vitality, the exhibition bridges the grounded sanctuary of Caribbean ecological memory with the kinetic, high-energy manufacture of light through abstraction.

Curatorial Statement

To live is not a passive state; it is an active, urgent mechanism of endurance. It requires both the rooting of oneself in the tangible earth and the relentless pursuit of light. LIVING explores two profoundly different, yet symbiotic, strategies for survival, vitality, and presence,examining how we anchor ourselves to reality, and how we manufacture the atmospheric energy required to navigate it.

For Thomas de la Rozière, "the living" is deeply ancestral and inextricably bound to the soil. Drawing on the lush, untamed topographies of Martinique and the dense architecture of the Jardin Créole, his oil paintings serve as acts of poetic grounding. De la Rozière does not merely illustrate flora; he captures the heavy, humid atmosphere of memory and cultural heritage. His canvases offer a tangible sanctuary, a world of deep greens, shadow, and organic structure where the land is a living entity holding history and offering refuge.

In stark, kinetic contrast, Marika Thoms approaches "the living" as a sheer vital sign—an explosive insistence on existing in the present tense. Working in raw, poured pigments (Schüttbilder), visceral charcoal marks, and searing neon accents across unprimed cotton, her vibrant abstraction operates as a radical, deliberate act of transmutation. Thoms uses color and painterly momentum as a force field against internal gravity and psychological weight. Her radiant, energetic gestures represent a conscious effort to forge bright light out of dark spaces. If de la Rozière’s work is the steady heartbeat of the earth, Thoms’s work is the sudden, electrical shock of adrenaline.

Brought together inside Galerie SLP, these practices form a complete, breathing ecosystem. The atmospheric tension between them, the rooted, authentic reality of the landscape pitted against the hyper-luminous, deliberate resilience of abstraction, generates a powerful dialogue. De la Rozière provides the dense, protective canopy and fertile ground, while Thoms unleashes the searing, unmitigated sunlight that breaks through it.