Scarlet is a shade of red with hints of orange. It's the color of flames and is often associated with courage, force, passion, heat, and joy, immorality and sin. In Classical mythology, the bright scarlet color of poppies signifies a promise of resurrection after death.
In this series of painting, the metaphor of the subliminal communication of the color, thrue the language of the plants, reflects the importance of color relationships, through fields of deep red pigments, to express strong emotions like tragedy, ecstasy, doom and envelop the viewers in a particular atmosphere, filled with passion, thoughts and poetry.
Oil on paper.

Louise Bourgeois once said « Color is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication. »

I was raised between Stockholm, Sweden and southern France. Since childhood, I have felt divided between the introspective, solitary culture of the vast Swedish landscapes and the more emotive character of the French. My work embodies this personal sense of ambivalence and is meant to encourage individual reflection and introspection by providing a strong emotional experience.

In my work I explore the gesture and the meeting, borders and connections, in the form of painting, objects, graphics and installations. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by colors, but not only as a basic subject, but also as an idea and metaphor for mood and atmosphere. I work around the exploration of light through darkness, and experiment with the processes and limits of color pigments, which I process with fingers and hands directly on the substrate. In my work I also use natural and recycled materials and products such as waste, yarn, lace, buttons, plant parts, which I tie, wrap, sew, reuse. A intense physical and tactile relationship to the material, a limited color palette, a conscious and specific gesture.

Nature, sky and light inspire me, I think about our place and our relation to the world around us, how much natural and built environments affect us and how we are shaped by everything we see and experience. The result is a desire to create a mood, through contrasts, structures, materials, shapes, an investigation of the work’s spatial properties. A metaphor for presence, absence, loneliness, community, the space in between that is never the same.

For several years now, I have been thinking about the concept of spaces. A space to emphasize and create a tension between opposite concepts, scales and elements as whole and parts, inside and outside, open and closed, central and decentralized, new and old. The space in between belongs to everyone and no one, this is where random encounters happen. A space that changes, a geographical, historical, social, physical, philosophical, poetic space that is created. A reflection on our place and surroundings, on the tension line between art and craft, the creative process.

Kesrtin Paillard