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Almine Rech

The Scarlet Letter

Nov 17, 2016 — Jan 29, 2017 | Fundatia Culturala Intact, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

“The concentrated nature of the work required to make an exhibition in a few weeks seems to have brought to the surface something I noticed from home in my paintings - red began to appear in various forms as part of paintings in which white or black were predominant. At the same time, I found, in a bookstore in Cluj, “Litera Stacojie”, the novel written in the 19th century by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I had read Hawthorne and liked it beforehand, but maybe the limited supply of books in English made me buy the volume. In any case, as you read the book it quickly becomes apparent that the story is structured based on an interaction between black, white and red, which are signs for the three main protagonists of the book. In the case of the main heroine, red often appears in the form of the letter A, from adultery, which she is forced to wear on her chest as a sign of depravity. Hawthorne was interested in alchemy - black, white and red are the three colors that signify a progression in the alchemical process. I was amazed by this coincidence between what I was painting and what I was reading, but I should point out that although the colors are related to certain characters in the book, there is a continuous transfer between them, a dialogic relationship, and this structural interaction is relevant. for the type of painting I want to do ”- Peter Peri, in an interview conducted by Florin Ștefan, the curator of the exhibition

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