Le Bonbon Rubis

Sometimes I paint things that aren’t entirely my own. I paint other people and their inner worlds, because I see myself in them. Rubis was born from an encounter—one between the creative vulnerability of an artist seeking to push her boundaries and the quiet intimacy of a stranger carrying a heavy burden, not yet knowing how to set it down. I was issuing an artistic challenge. Rubis M., a subscriber, responded to something much deeper. By suggesting green and red—and by substituting the theme of self-love for the emotions I’d asked for—she wasn’t just guiding a color palette. She was revealing a wound—that of the child she once was: different, misunderstood, waiting for words that never came from the mouths of those who should have spoken them. The “Rubis” canvas was born from this confession—thirty centimeters in diameter with an epoxy resin finish, colors that vibrate with the gentleness and intensity of what they convey. But what the eye sees is only the surface of a letter. A letter that an adult woman was finally writing to herself. To tell the little girl she once was what no one had ever told her—that she had never been the problem. That she deserved to be loved, exactly as she was. Rubis is proof that art, at its best, creates the space for what life has failed to offer.