Rose RAS

A student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2019, the young visual artist Rose Ras expresses herself through both painting and sculpture. Originally from Haiti, her work is rooted in the memories that connect her to her childhood: landscapes and architecture form the themes of her early canvases.

Creation has become Rose's preferred mode of expression and introspection. Freeing herself from her traumas through a multidisciplinary approach, she constantly reinvents the subjects that have left an indelible mark on her memory.

In the 2023 Private Choice selection, the road is the central theme: tires invade Nature, which is mutated by Man and his mechanical interventions. Giving prominence to the subject of temporality, industrial and natural elements coexist permanently in her compositions.

Her relationship with matter adds a symbolic dimension to her production. The material with which Rose Ras experiments is none other than the tire: created to resist, the rubber ends up being mastered by the artist to merge with an antinomic and natural material, made of clay. Trained in ceramics and carving, one can easily detect Rose's taste for enameled surfaces.

In the series Close to the Ground, the use of liquid tar on his small-format canvases is another way of inviting the theme of the road into his work. Contrasting with this thick, matte material, the vitrified appearance of the resinous paint almost takes on the look of stoneware.

The flagship work of the selection, named Deceleration, is a white ceramic tire cast, dotted with rows of teeth. It was while reading the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa that the artist imagined this ambiguous sculpture, where the robustness of the automobile, designed for speed, is confronted with the slow growth of the human skeleton.