Par excellence, the most magical element of art is colour. Where subject, form, and line primarily affect thought, colour is meaningless for the mind, but completely overpowers the senses.

 Eugène Delacroix

Colour plays a cardinal role in Léopoldine Roux’s work. In her own words, she would not exist without colour. For the past twenty years, this subjective truth has outlined the boundaries of her artistic practice, where colour is intended as a medium to unite line, painting and sculpture. Here, we firmly stand in the realm of materials, sensations and touch. Léopoldine Roux’s colour is running water: a material flow, a pulsating flux, a moving, undulating energy spilling outside the frame of the painting and the flat surface of the image, splashing out in generous, unctuous sheets onto the real world of objects, things and even the public space – so many places for experimenting with the medium of colour per se. The artist explores wastelands. Away from the beaten paths of bocages, she forges her own trail, allowing colour to wander, to be delirious – delirare, fleeing the groove. Consequently, colour breaks free from the orderly field of painting and its established conventions. It is neither abstraction nor figuration: just pure nomadic substance.

With their bright and flashy colours, Léopoldine Roux’s light-hearted, whimsical works draw our gaze. While at first glance reminiscent of the chromatic field of pop art, they are markedly distinct from this movement: her coloured forms do not refer to iconic products of consumer society, to which they would be a somewhat nebulous critical apology. Instead, the sheer materiality of colour constitutes the fluid core of these traces, drops, and streams of light, through which the artist liberates herself from her obnubilation for the spot of colour, the stain: granting it attributes of beauty, sacredness, brilliance, delicacy, and harmony, the artist delivers a cathartic operation of softening reality. This contemplative process provides a sensitive response to the world’s harsh realities.

The Rainbow Seeds lend a physical existence to elements that have none. The colours of the rainbow – which is merely an optical phenomenon – acquire shape, substance, and volume in these “monolith sedimentary stones”, i.e. bluestone blocks unfit for construction purposes, which are painted by the artist in the quarry and varnished to shield them from the ravages of time. Glistening like drops of water, shimmering like a mirage on the horizon, the compact, colourful stones become seedlings sprouting from the surface, pulled out from the depths of the rich earth that has nurtured them and slowly thrust out. What an enchantment for the eyes: the miracle becomes tangible in the enigmatic encounter between shapes and colours, where liquid and solid, ephemeral and immutable, immaterial and material, volatile and tactile, all converge. And suddenly, nothing feels heavy anymore, and the pure light of the sky moistens our gaze, trickling down within us and drenching reality. Our eyes, cleansed from the dreariness of everyday life, recapture the painless, radiant world of childhood.

Then we come upon large kakemonos hung on public lighting poles pierced with holes to reveal glimpses of the sky. In Léopoldine Roux’s new project, we shift from materials to images of the materials: these watered-down, diluted, floating colours were created by subjecting gouaches on paper to rainwater. The artist has then burnt off the traces of the drops before printing these wet and cauterised papers on veils. The piece alludes to the increasingly widespread problem of acid rain, where gases and particles generated by over-industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels have made water unfit for human consumption. Acid Rains is a word that sends shivers down our spines. To our ears, it rings much like a gloomy, generic heavy metal playlist playing on mute while our world spins out of balance, plummeting and crumbling to its doom before our wet eyes. Yet, this innovative installation, whose darker tonality breaks away from the universe we have come to expect from the artist, remains true to her unwavering ecosystem and inner mantra. Should we, humankind, die of our stupidity, we shall end up in colour(s). With tiny specks of sky in our eyes.

François de Coninck