After an exhibition organized around the concept of a deck of 54 tarot cards, mirroring the tarot deck created in Marseilles by André Masson and André Breton in 1941, Vida Verba continued her work around faces, looks. With this new series of portraits, Vida Verba personifies each of these portraits by giving them a title, often a first name, because it is with kindness and recognition of each or each of those she has chosen to present that she traces a common thread for this exhibition. Is it this benevolence that is the animated source of a veritable “creative frenzy of faces that are all dissimilar and yet so familiar? It is in fact a tireless search for a look to meet, to question in order to draw from it a reassuring contact” as Vida Verba likes to introduce her work. The result is dozens of “mouths”, expressions of as many personalities and then articulating from one to another, as they appear in the imagination and under the guise of Vida Verba. We are not far from a diversion of the concept of the gallery of ancestors which welcome visitors to certain castles. All dissimilar but belonging to the same family. How not to think of the final scene of Les Enfants du Paradis by Marcel Carné? The crowd, the multitude can only be hostile if we do not meet the gaze of some and humanity is lost if we see in a crowd only one non-divisible entity?

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Russian on her father's side and Iranian on her mother's, Vida Verba first studied architecture in Paris, and later dedicated her entire time to painting. She currently lives in Martinique. Her inspiration is a subtle mix of Iranian impregnation, of Russia as told by her grandmother, of France where she studied architecture and of Martinique which inhabits her. It is the richness of these differences, the diversity of cultures and his sensitivity to the world around him that fuels his desire to paint. His imagination is filled with beings living in a parallel world where the ridiculous, the insignificant and the anecdotal become valves to often heavy reality.