My work is rooted in a narrative construction, nourished by intimate stories, texts, and encounters that connect with me.
Maria Adjovi’s painting unfolds like an inner narrative, woven from words, memories, and staged scenes. Her work takes root in fragments of affect-laden experience, transformed through a patient and intuitive pictorial process. While autobiographical in part, this narrative becomes a space of exploration, reflecting the artist’s ongoing questions about her own presence in the world.
She speaks of a “moral sense of life,” one that weighs on her — the subtle weight of our contradictions, beliefs, and responsibilities as human beings. Her canvases seek to grasp the density of that condition, made of faith, attachments, impulses, and doubts. This inner tension emerges through figures bathed in light, through a pictorial gesture where erasure is as vital as appearance.
Adjovi builds her images slowly, through a form of visual writing nourished by photography, literature, and art history. Her characters seem to rise from another time — both distant and familiar — in a warm, veiled light. Using oil paint, Maria Adjovi creates scenes where transparency and depth give rise to a veiled, muted atmosphere. Gradually, contours soften, bodies dissolve into light, and the image emerges through delicate gestures that recall the sfumato of Italian Renaissance painters.
She speaks of offering a form of truth — not one that is grand or demonstrative, but one that is felt: a truth revealed in the eyes, in silence, in the fragile vibration of presence. Through her process of erasure and recommencement, Maria Adjovi invites us to slow down, to contemplate, to make room for what does not impose itself, but endures.
Born in 1996 in Porto-Novo (Benin), Maria received the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts – Weil Prize (Paris, France) and the Diptyque Grant from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024. That same year, she was also nominated for the Ellipse Prize.
She lives and works in Paris. She is currently in her fourth year at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.