Impressed by the attractive works, I now recognize Melanie Authier as a technical, fresh, unique and thoughtful contemporary artist throughout her zoom talk.

By drawing upon the histories of abstraction and the strategies of representation, she presents a unique space of contradiction and fusion in her works. In her works, you can see the color, line, color block and even the idea of the collision and inclusion. These color blocks and lines fill every corner of the canvas, like an endless maze, giving people a sense of compact space.
Unlike many painters who prefer high or low saturation to color, the use of different colors can be seen in Melanie’s works.

In her work, we can see that single color blocks of similar colors constitute progressive patches of color. This makes the picture look soft. It can also be seen that the single color pieces of the contrasting colors can be pieced together into a powerful image set, which makes the image look strong and aggressive. These percussive color blocks are stacked on top of each other or presented in opposite picture forms, which makes the whole work full of visual impact. This may be her unique vision language.

In addition to the special color, Melanie’s use of lines and color blocks also make me feel interesting. Her paintings generally use angular geometric blocks, such as shining diamonds or broken pieces of glass. This color block gives the picture an ambivalent feeling of individual fragmentation and integration. I find it very interesting that I can see one painting from several individual color blocks, but see another painting from one integrated color block.

I’d like to talk about my feelings with two of her paintings as examples. One is Melanie’s latest work The Architect of Voids. The dominant colors of the picture are white and blue. She fused lines with geometric blocks of color in the painting. You can see that there are very smooth lines in some large areas of color, making the picture look like a crumpled soft cloth. But the edges and corners of the color block make the picture hard and broken, reminding me of raging waves. The upper left part of the picture adopts a large area of vertigo effect, so that no lines or color blocks can be seen, forming a clear contrast with the lower right part of the picture. This gentle, desalinated image again reminds me of the calm sky after the storm.

Another piece I want to talk about is Fire Spitter. This painting gives me a sense of spurting, tension, and even anger. Unlike the former, you can hardly tell the main tones in this painting. That is because a lot of high-saturation colors are used in this work, and each color takes up about the same amount of space. You can see large areas of white, orange, blue, green, and interspersed with lines and patches of red, yellow, pink, and purple. If the visual impact of the previous work mainly comes from the painting techniques (lines, color blocks and shading), then the visual impact of this work undoubtedly comes from the use of color.

In general, I like Melanie Authier’s artistic style very much, and I have learned some new ways of expression from her painting skills and ideas.