My origins deeply mark my identity and my artistic expression. I grew up by the sea, the source of my inspiration is maritime, solar, Mediterranean. It’s a sentimental, slightly melancholic world, filled with the pink August skies and the warm earth of the hills, the bleached seaside at sunset, the indistinct deepness of the horizon. Through my artistic approach I aim at rendering this territory of mine, be it the personal or the geographical one. My pictorial language mixes these influences with a research centered around the notions of color and gesture: materiality or evanescence of the first, erasing or highlighting the second. To paint means to shift the subject, to transpose reality into an « elsewhere » free of any reference points and that only the viewer’s eye in front of the painting can define. It’s also an act through which I give shape to a sensitive, sensual perception, expressing a deep love for light and color and a strong belief in their magic and mysterious nature. The painting process is like a ritual to reveal them: the mixtures and proportions, the direction of my gestures on the canvas produce shades that are always for me a source of surprise and emotion. What I want to reveal is both material and inexpressible. If the colored gradations first suggest airspaces, they also oppose their artificiality, their nature as an artifact. The void here is full of color, in tension with the density of the layers, the intensity of the saturation. Custodian of my successive gestures, the painted surface delivers them erased by their own repetition; the colors are dissolved, absorb the trace of the passage of the hand. Seeking to escape, I see the impossibility of achieving it: imperfection, however discreet it is, always reveals the process. My hand cannot imitate the sky. Contrary to the erasure and the surface fatness of the color gradients painted with oil, the use of the paint pistol articulates my research around the materiality of color, revealing a palpable, earthly reality – the hand yet never touching the canvas directly. The paint plays with the structure of the raw canvas, giving of a very unique vibration. In a similar approach, the work with sand explores an opposite materiality. While conveying a seaside and summery fantasy, sand refers us by its specificity to the notions of tangible and intangible, of disappearance, of elusiveness. The lack of limits and loss of reference points express as much the quest for an horizon as the wish to get lost in it. It’s about making a space exist, by color and by gesture. Through the variations of materials and media, I seek the continuity of a universe, that I want as immersive for the viewer as is for me the perception of the world around me.

 

Dorothée Louise Recker