Medusa in red and black: Éliane Chiron’s “numerical painting

Abstract

The text titled “Medusa in red and black. Éliane Chiron’s “numerical painting”, written by Icleia Borsa Cattani, highlights the creative journey of digital painting by the artist and writer Éliane Chiron. He points out that, initially, the artist worked with drawings and paintings, using traditional means, developing an original poietic and poetic style. The properties of the hand, when working, and its own intelligence, the physicality of materials and supports, the qualities of lines and colors, had long been part of Chiron's work. The switch to digital did not happen suddenly. In the 1990s, alongside drawings and paintings, she created videos, performances and installations of great expressive power, in which color constituted a fundamental element. The text mainly illuminates the mythical theme of the figure of the Medusa present in Chiron's work. It also highlights that the plastic qualities of the images are developed and accentuated, creating a visual power derived from the aesthetic strength, in the figures, spaces and the treatment given to them. When working with matter in painting, Éliane Chiron accumulates layers of colors and figures, moving and distorting the whole, until she almost reaches abstraction. Red and black are omnipresent and sometimes end up swallowing the characters, “killing” them symbolically and figuratively