A colour can seem soothing, solemn, joyful or unsettling before we can say where that impression comes from. We immediately sense a particular mood in it, as though the shade already carried a meaning. Yet what we feel in the presence of a colour has a history: of the images we have encountered, the conventions we have learned, and the events that have connected it, for each of us, with an experience.
The title of Laurent Cohen’s book, Le Parfum du rouge et la Couleur du Z, offered me a starting point for this reflection. The neurological accounts brought together in the book open up questions about perception and the relationships between what we see, recognise and experience. From there, I want to explore how colour acquires emotional meaning and comes to play a part in our inner lives.
There is a language of colour that we inherit from the world in which we grow up. We encounter it in clothing, rituals, painting, everyday objects, and even in the expressions through which we speak about emotions. We learn to read certain colours as signs of celebration, authority, danger or intimacy. These meanings circulate so naturally that we rarely ask how they came into being, or in what circumstances they might be read differently.
Over this shared language lies a personal one, made up of associations that are not always easy to explain. For one person, a yellow may preserve the light of a much-loved home; for another, the same shade may recall a room in which they felt alone. A blue can open up a sense of distance or bring a familiar object close. Sometimes we know where an association comes from; at other times, we feel only its effect, unable to recover the scene in which it began.
The two registers intertwine. Personal experience can reinforce a cultural meaning, alter it or contradict it. It is precisely this space that interests me, where the meaning of a colour remains open to interpretation even though our response seems immediate. Research into associations between colours and emotions identifies both patterns shared across populations and differences linked to linguistic and geographical context. What we have in common does not erase the particularity of each experience.
It also matters to distinguish between the emotion we associate with a colour and the state we actually experience in its presence. We may consider a colour cheerful without it making us cheerful at a particular moment. We may describe a shade as calm and yet experience it as cold or distant in a certain space. This distinction interests me because it keeps the relationship between language, expectation and lived experience open.
In painting, these relationships become more fluid still. Colour takes shape in a material, under a particular light and alongside other colours. A transparent pink can suggest a fragility that the same shade, applied in a dense layer, no longer has. A green can seem fresh, heavy or strange depending on the area it occupies and what surrounds it. As I work, I discover that a painting’s emotional atmosphere develops through these relationships, through the ways in which colours support one another, interrupt one another or alter each other’s intensity.
This reflection also met with the memory of an exhibition I visited in Monaco, Couleurs !, at the Grimaldi Forum. In the exhibition’s monochromatic spaces, the visual experience was accompanied by fragrances created by Alexis Dadier in collaboration with Fragonard. Each chromatic world had its own olfactory interpretation, allowing colour to be encountered through several senses.
The idea of composing a fragrance for a colour opens up a territory I would like to explore further. What do we choose to express about a red when we seek a scent for it: sweetness, warmth, sensuality, violence? What experience of green do we want a fragrance to evoke: a crushed leaf, the dampness of a garden, freshness or a certain bitterness? Each choice is already an interpretation, making one of colour’s possibilities visible — or perceptible in another way.
In Fragonard’s account of the project, red was composed through the meeting of red-fruit notes, blackcurrant and accents evoking blood. The composition sought to express the ambivalence of a colour in which pleasure and intensity can approach unease. What interests me here is the way fragrance can shift our reading of colour: what we see and what we smell come to interpret one another.
My new collection will develop from the meeting of these questions. I want to explore colour through its history, the way we perceive it, and the emotional associations we build around it. I am also interested in the material history of colours — pigments, surfaces and their uses — alongside the meanings they acquire in different periods and in our lives.
Within this exploration, the relationship with fragrance will have a special place. I would like to investigate how an olfactory sensation can accompany an experience of colour, reinforce it or take it in an unexpected direction. Painting will be the place in which these connections are explored, with attention to what actually emerges in the work and to each viewer’s freedom to experience them in their own way.
Colours accompany us in our most ordinary choices: in what we wear, in the rooms where we feel at ease, in the objects we keep and in the images we return to. Through them, we express ourselves, find our bearings and give an atmosphere to the places we inhabit. The new collection will begin with this everyday presence, so often overlooked, to ask how colour becomes familiar to us and how, sometimes, an encounter with it can change the way we experience the world.
