The Memory of White

Solo Exhibitions

Lee Gallery,
9 rue Visconti, 75006 Paris.
Exhibition from January 6 to 27, 2015

The traces of foam left by the waves on the shoreline inspire this series of paintings created using only white on natural linen canvas. My idea is that the sea foam is a matrix of white where landscapes, both real and ethereal, take on strength and form. These landscapes are projected into a timeless dimension, between figuration and abstraction, without points of reference. The white, through its varied movements, its strong and whimsical touches, leaves its powerful yet ephemeral memory on the sand.
In these landscapes, I sometimes insert bodies that emerge and mingle with the arabesques drawn by the foam. These are beings suspended in a moment of peace, surrender, ecstasy, who seem to draw their inner energy from the water that shapes them. They are in perfect harmony with the white of the sea waves, which cradles and envelops them, hides and reveals them at the same time, in the lyrical evocation of a kind of purity from an ancestral world.
For me, the water in these paintings has a symbolic value that white manages to capture in all its immediate power. It refers us back to intimate experience, to the stages of our existence and the dreams that nourish it. Through this work, I attempt to explore the evocative power of white and its capacity to make us cross the boundary between reality and imagination: “The Imagination is not a state but the human existence itself” (William Blake).
The white of the waves appears to me as the symbol of a world where all colors have disappeared, a world where I rediscover the sensation of inner peace, an absolute, impenetrable silence.
“White resonates internally like a non-sound, which corresponds to certain silences in music. It is a silence full of possibility. White sounds like a silence that could suddenly be understood. It is a nothingness, which is young, or even more precisely, a nothingness before the beginning, before birth.” "Perhaps this is how the earth sounded on the white days of the Ice Age" (W. Kandinsky, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in Particular").

Press:
Galerie LEE exhibition Rossella ROSSI , Artetcommunication.com