Anne-Sarah Le Meur

Pink is not a simple colour. It is culturally saturated with meanings — femininity, childhood, softness, kitsch — that art history has often avoided or sidestepped. Anne-Sarah Le Meur confronts them head-on with Rose Apothéose, making pink the very subject of her chromatic exploration. Yet this is not a single pink: the exhibition unfolds an infinite spectrum of shades — bubblegum pink, old rose, mauve, pale apricot, milky pink, fuchsia — revealing the complexity and richness of a colour one would be wrong to take lightly.

The shift from black to pink between Immatière (2016) and Rose Apothéose (2018) is also a poetic and philosophical shift. Where black called for interiority, for dark and serious contemplation, pink invites a sensual jubilation, a lightness that is not superficial but deeply considered. Anne-Sarah Le Meur’s generative works — paintings in perpetual motion, surfaces of colour that vibrate and transform in real time — here reach a kind of apotheosis: colour becomes pure, immersive, almost bodily experience. This is a major exhibition of digital painting, at its most accomplished.

For her fourth exhibition at Galerie Charlot, the artist who had accustomed us to her intense black grounds changes tack: make way for pink! Bubblegum pink or fuchsia, old rose, mauve perhaps?, pale apricot skin pink, fresh pink, milky pink… The compositions of the surfaces are then organised around velvety, warm colours, sometimes contrasted and punctuated by their opposites: bright yellow, bold green. Sometimes a pink only reveals at second glance that it is juxtaposed with a similar hue, slightly different, imperceptible at first, but which then grates gently under the eye. Acid pink? An intertwining of minimalism and radiance. Elsewhere, the ground takes the form of an invasive substance, partly making the surface disappear “from underneath”. Pleats tremble, smooth expanses settle. Perception becomes more complex thanks to contrary impressions: substance or surface? surface or space?

Anne-Sarah Le Meur’s 3D space has the particularity of being “diminished”, paradoxically reduced to a surface in motion, and thus of slight volume, in an in-between state of near-thickness. While our society constantly urges us towards the faster, the bigger, the more visible…, this artist’s ambition aims for a “less” in pursuit of a “better”: her sliver of volume brings about minute yet subtle plastic effects linked to perspective.