KARINE ROCHE
Travel has always been part of my pictorial practice. The nomadic life of my childhood opened me to the impact of the geographical, social and cultural landscape on the individual.
My paintings are the remember 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 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. 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 composition of the landscape becomes almost abstract. The gaze circulates on the canvas and does not need to focus on a particular scene. The different networks of lines punctuate the painting in order to leave the observer free to travel in the details of the painting.