Anne de Suède

A French / Swedish artist, Anne de Suède uses a variety of media in her artistic expression including oils, tempera, acrylics, collage and sculpture, to put meaningful and important questions to the observer.
It is clear that she wants the viewer to reflect beyond a superficial reading of her paintings or sculptures and to reach below the surface.
They are tools that Anne uses to help the viewer’s look at their own emotional state, starting with the subconscious and through the use of strong bold colours this process is accentuated.
We can see for example in the work The waterfall gives me hope in which the outline of two human figures is divided in two by a sort of wall of thought or this cascade of water, so that their upper bodies from where their thoughts stem, are highlighted against a red background and the strong blue tone of the water in the lower section that conceals their bodies, is both profound yet in movement.
We see the same contrast of red and blue in the painting entitled The waterfall.
This time there is an additional connection given by the use of black, which from the upper section – the area of thought – flows into the blue of the body without interruption and indeed the shape of the upper area could be seen by the observer to be a brain and thus, from where your thoughts flow. In The dream of freedom, the movement is not from top to bottom but from left (blue) to right (red).
To make Anne’s questions more complex, more clearly defined figurative elements appear, such as the large spider web with a sphere in the centre which we can imagine to be a head.
Even though Anne gives precise titles to her paintings, questions are deliberately left unanswered, because it is more important for her that the viewer questions and investigates within himself. This is the process that Anne wants to stimulate and she leaves freedom of response.
As the sociologist Jean-Noël Kapferer wrote, a message is simply interpreted, that then this interpretation corresponds to the intention of the source is another matter entirely.
In Anne’s paintings, interpretations may be veiled because she manipulates colours and shapes, but she does this precisely to provoke a reaction from the viewer.
For this purpose, she also inserts symbols which may be abstract or photographs which are of course realistic, thereby crossing the boundaries of the imagination and leading the viewer on an extremely interesting inner journey.