Why I'm Afraid of Red, Hate Yellow, and Love Blue, 2023

In his Dictionary of Dadaism (1916–1922), published in 1976, Georges Huguet defines collage as “a creative process that consists of cutting out images or elements of images with scissors and assembling them with glue, guided by intuition, the pleasure of the imagination, and the sole rule of disorientation—without precluding the element of chance that this process may entail—in order to bring reality into play and thus enter the realm of the marvelous by diverting images from their original purpose and their mundane meaning.”

Katrien de Blauwer excels at the art of “to see an image within another image or within several other images".

Her introspective body of work, in which the female figure is omnipresent, is both intimate and universal. His radical cutouts from popular—even stereotypical—photographs found in magazines and periodicals allow him to create a vast, anonymous, and enigmatic visual repertoire, all rendered in a single range of nuanced grays with a matte, powdery finish. The collage reveals the latent content of the images and generates a powerful narrative force, accentuated by the artist’s incisive pencil lines across the composition.

This new series transports us into three distinct atmospheres, revealing the emotional impact of primary colors: red stands out as a symbol of danger and violence; yellow evokes anxiety and hatred, as well as the feeling of confinement during the lockdown. The sensual blue sequence, meanwhile, is a source of calm.

↘︎ Acknowledgments and mentions : In partnership with Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery, Paris, and FIFTY ONE Gallery, Antwerp