Barbara Collé on Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns’ Where are you

Sirocco Journal Nº3
2025

Irene Zottola is a Spanish artist who explores themes of intimacy, identity, and the human condition.

As a visual artist and philosopher, Barbara Collé explores our colour experiences. She writes essays and creates artists’ books. She is also a guest lecturer at several Dutch universities and art academies.

The woman stands at the front left of the image. Her body posture forms a half-self embrace, as you can cherish yourself by touching your other arm with your hand, protecting your heart. It is a tender, gentle embrace. Her hand rests relaxed on her upper arm and this loving gesture combined with her downward gaze makes it clear that this woman feels secure. Her posture tells me that she is aware of the woman standing behind her. She does not see her but she senses her. She feels the way she can only feel when she is with her, her younger sister. It is that memory of when they were together that makes her feel safe. This image shows how your life can feel complete through the connection you experience with that one precious person. How you can experience wholeness by connecting in the moment of being together.

The three images featured here in Sirocco Journal are from the print series Where are you by Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns. It is a series whose first image appeared in 2018. The series is about the very cherished sisterly bond between the artist and her sister. When the younger sister had died, Ariëns saw her everywhere, in trees and clouds. She began capturing those images and translating them into art. The first prints are characterised by a fullness of passionate deep blacks and felt-through dark greys, always accompanied by an intensely warm shining light.

In these newly added art prints, the intense longing is still recognisable and the straight-from-the-heart memories are still palpable. But longing has taken on a different rhythm and timbre after all these years. In these works, an energetic grey vibrates and radiates. Grey exudes the feeling of ultimate safety, like that feathery feeling that embraces you as you lie on your back in the sea and are carried through the water.

The colour grey has many interpretations in art history, but one meaning that keeps recurring is the unifying power it has. After all, grey represents nuance and is the opposite of black and white. The colour helps artists show what happens in the transitions from one to the other. According to Vincent van Gogh, grey has the ability to evoke warmth, excitement and creativity. For Agnes Martin, grey is the colour that can reach into the most basic relationship between a person and the landscape. Concepts like creativity, warmth and connection that have no image become visible and thus tangible through shades of grey. That which we cannot grasp but can experience, such as a memory, we can represent with grey par excellence.

The richness of flowing grey tones in Ariëns images is made possible by the old printing technique of photopolymer etching used here. First, a photograph is exposed on a photopolymer-coated printing plate, after which a delayed process begins. This process allows Ariëns to work like a painter, she strokes layer upon layer with her hand so that the ink spreads. The image literally appears under her hands, allowing her to intuitively add subtlety and refinement. This handwork makes the whole range of greys emerge during this supreme meditative concentration. Then, using the etching press, the image appears on the paper.Nothing about these art prints is static. Even in the picture where admittedly the two women are sitting on the ground holding hands, time does not stand still. As if in a mirror image, the women sit facing each other. It is the moment exactly before one helps the other upright and they end up in a new movement. You can tell by the strength in their arms and their concentrated gaze that they will break their reflection in less than a split second. But not yet. It is precisely the reflection in the image that allows both women to be an imagination. Not physically present, but represented in the memory of the other.

Besides the etching technique, there is something else that enhances the dynamics in the images. Even while capturing the images, things dance, run and flow around Ariëns and her models. Ariëns was trained at a Dutch ballet academy. Because of this background, she not only knows what dance movements should look like, but also how they feel physically, and precisely because of this, she conveys that feeling like no other. She does not work with a preconceived plan and certainly not with poses. She brings the women she photographs into a flow that allows them to throw overboard their learned postures and be free of control. In this vulnerability, because for both photographer and model it is an uncertain state they find themselves in when any plan is lacking, an essence emerges that transcends the mundane. It becomes a recognisable, empathetic image that speaks to our heart and being.

In the third picture, we see a woman lying down and although we do not immediately see a second person, everything about her body language makes it clear that she is not alone, but together. The shades of grey that connect her body to the floor on which she lies seem to flow over into another figure. This artwork is the ultimate representation of a memory. Wasn’t another person lying there shortly before? Loss takes form here in the almost invisible imprint on the floor. This image fully captures the title of this longterm series: Where are you.

It is the shades of grey that give these art works a lightness. Hopeful is the meaning Ariëns adds to the power of the colour grey. Dare to have hope while intensely missing that person with whom you feel so connected. Dare to think back with gratitude and a sense of belonging to the shared moments in all the nuances, all the shades and hues you imagine possible. Because that longing makes you dance together in fluid motions, it makes you celebrate love. Those memories take you in a flow from the here and now to the past, and also back again.

All Rights Reserved – Text © Barbara Collé
Images © Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns