ABOUT THE ARTIST
I'm Léna Ruisz, a painter based in Basel, Switzerland, a colour and pigment enthusiast, forever gathering memories and small narratives and setting them down on paper.
I'm a trained musician, which means I live more or less permanently inside sound – and when I paint, all of that finally goes quiet. My mind stills, everything I have to say starts coming out slowly, through the brush, and the silence fills up with colour instead. It is one of my truest channels to the outside world, and I think that is precisely because it takes its time.
To me, painting and music are really the same act – storytelling, rhetoric, the same thing said two different ways. A painting was never meant to be a likeness of something. It is simply what I am saying, in colour. So nothing I make is faint, or pastel, or quiet. I keep the pigment as dense and as saturated as it will go, a direct translation of how I feel and of the story I am telling, and almost every painting carries quiet pathways and hidden meanings folded somewhere inside it.
Come close. Close enough to find them, close enough to catch every last flicker of pigment – that is where my whole heart is. Look the way you used to look as a child, when you found the things nobody else had noticed and came back to them again and again. Curious, and open, and bright.
These paintings are made to be lived with. Each one begins as a real watercolour, painted entirely by hand, and from there the colour is matched against the original and proofed on the very same paper, proof after proof, until the print holds everything the painting itself holds. I see every single one through myself before it goes anywhere. Only then does it come to you, as a fine art print.