Emotions as a colour


 		 Painting to Delphine is foremost an exchange of feelings: between the painter and her model, between the canvas and the viewer. That’s because when the emotions take over, painting is the only way to go.

The emotion originates first of all from discovering the other through travel. In South America, Delphine was moved by the people, their context and their differences. Her paint brush moved to the rhythm of the Brazilian colors, the multitude of skin shades, the light and the ever-present sun, the fabrics, the flowers.
One can see the South American influence in her art on the faces from the series turbulence and Made in Braziou. Her portrait of the Ecuadorian Oswaldo Guayasamin conveys the density found on Mexican murals. Her Blazing canvases reveal a sensual relationship with painting and color not dissimilar to the energetic brush strokes of some German expressionists’ such as d’Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc.

Back in France, she continues to paint people in rainbow colors. This time her inspirations comes from photographs of famous people (Gueules a part series) which she appropriates in order to bring a new look to those well known faces. The viewer is made to forget the transient nature of photography and discovers instead icons of our times set in a new medium.

In the series "Bêtisier", a similar process is at work. Here the most common of animal is allowed to be portrayed in the most ancestral of traditions. The donkey thereby becomes through its scrutinizing eyes a striking sovereign of a far away kingdom. The dog is no longer a detail but the main subject which Delphine puts at the forefront of her canvas and where the viewer cannot miss it.

With her broad artistic range and original outlook, Delphine leads you into a very intimate world, where living beings – both human and animal – are at the forefront of her artistic expression. Their emotions become ours through the prism of color.

Caroline Gibert, picture editor