Parfum d'agrumes by Isabel Mahe
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on hardboard
Dimensions: 48 x 60 cm
Year: 2026
Price: $950.00 USD
Status: available
Parfum d’agrumes explores the mysterious way in which memory can return through the senses. A fleeting glimmer of light, a familiar scent, a touch of air — and suddenly, something long forgotten comes back to us. The painting evokes those invisible moments when a sensation becomes a memory, and when the past briefly reappears without warning. Here, memory has no face. It exists simply as light, colour and sensation. . . . Artist's poetic text: . . . Some memories have no face. All it takes is a glimmer of light, a scent, a touch of air, and the heart remembers. . . .
Why collect this work?
The close crop binds lowered face, raised hand and cascading hair into a compressed curve, turning a conventional portrait pose into an image of sensation held just beyond explanation.
- The artist profile describes Mahe’s practice as centred on the female figure and increasingly paired with poetry. Here, her text proposes scent as a trigger for memory, an intention supported, though not proven, by the subject’s closed eyes and inward pose.
- In the photograph, the face appears in profile while the hand touches the neck, creating a pause between self-contact and withdrawal. Orange surrounds the figure, with green and pale marks gathering at the left and lower edges like diffuse light rather than a defined setting.
- Catalogued as oil on hardboard, the work uses a firm support that can accommodate both broad rubbed-looking passages and finer contours. The photographed surface shifts between softened flesh, linear strands of hair and broken background marks.
- This painting has particular relevance within displays examining how contemporary portraiture represents senses that cannot be pictured directly. Its absent citrus fruit makes the title operate through association rather than illustration.
About the Artist
Isabel Mahe
Isabel Mahe is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: Painter. Based in CHASSENON 16150, FR.
Nationality: French
My painting explores the female figure as a space of emotion, vulnerability, sensuality and freedom.
