KARINE ROCHE
Travel has always been part of my pictorial practice. The nomadic life of my childhood opened me to the richness and multiplicity of the cultures of the world and the impact of the geographical, social and cultural landscape on the individual.
My paintings are landscapes that tell of my travels. They are the memory of places traversed. My relationship to the territory and the environment. Each place is the pretext to paint new series. I was inspired by cities like Rio de Janeiro with the Amazonian forest at the city's doorstep, Baku surrounded by petrochemical iron and steel factories, Italy or even megacities like New York or Cairo. The architecture of cities and the natural landscape create networks of lines that are always different between organic and geometric.
Human history shines through in the landscape. Global architecture unifies the visual appearance of all cities. Conversely, vernacular architecture translates urban choices to preserve or create a cultural unity around elements relating to the habits and customs of the population. The architectural forms, the ornamentation codify the environment; determine territories and borders which translate symbolically on the canvas
The landscape is a social construction. We are today in a new situation because we are aware of generating sustainable ecosystem transformation. Ecological architecture considers another approach to housing, new models of urban planning in order to better integrate the city into its environment. Large format of the paintings allows the scale of the body to fit into it. The city and nature are outside the frame of the web, they are expanding organisms which create a symbiosis.
The landscape offers a great diversity of forms and a complexity of the perception of space, a labyrinthine distortion. The landscape is also a mental landscape, an analogy with the meanders of thought.. The different perspectives on my paintings are the different ways of looking at things. The painting is a dialogue between the materials of the paint, opaque, shiny, fluid, dense, thick and The infinity of shades of colors to create light and contrasts. The composition of the landscape becomes almost abstract. The gaze circulates on the canvas and does not need to focus on a particular scene. The cavalier and atmospheric perspectives, the different contrasts of colors, complementary, chiaroscuro, hot cold... organize the lines of force and the focal points of the composition. The empty spaces and the more or less dense zones of the different networks of lines produce a dynamic and punctuate the painting in order to leave the observer free to travel in the details of the painting.