Rose Ras - One foot deep, a light within

One foot in the earth,

and at the core of each of us, a light flickers.

To reveal what illuminates is to court difficulty. Light, as event, prior to image, prior even to visibility, conditions what can be seen while simultaneously destabilising its legibility. When offered in excess, in spectacle, as sheer intensity, it blinds. Since the nineteenth century, this ambiguity has become irreversible: vision fractures, seeing becomes a risk, an exp(l)osure. As speed accelerates, digital flux, image without origin, light is seized by velocities that estrange it from experience.

It strikes,

circulates,

consumes.

It is from this unstable force of the visible that, in Rose Ras’s work, matter becomes a site of apparition. For her solo exhibition at VIN VIN, the artist presents an entirely new body of paintings on wood. Their titles borrow from the tradition of landscape, some echoing a recent journey to Japan. What persists are images and sensations that accrue density within the thickness of the panels themselves. Router, gouge, scraper, brush, jigsaw, torch, soldering iron, the landscape here is no longer an expanse but a depth worked through, a support that is simultaneously subject, material, and terrain.

A geological dimension unfolds in stratified layers of wood, assembled and overlaid with oil, spray paint, or acrylic, then excavated through insistent, concentric gestures. Light rises from below, inscribed within a deep time, both consequence of action and enduring wound. Accidents and burns are integral to the painting. The raw clarity of wood is accessible only through the grey trails left by tools, through splinters and emergent screws. Nothing reveals itself without resistance.

“The pink fabric gleamed like metal, reflecting the sun’s rays until they pierced the retina.” Thus was Tanaka Atsuko’s Pink Rayon described, nylon unfurled in open air in 1956 at Ashiya Park near Kobe. Noon light, solar red, brilliance carried to the point of perforation. The contained and irradiated energy of the Gutai group, this “meteorology” of impact, accompanied Rose Ras throughout the making of this exhibition. It resonates in her gestures and in her palette: heated, incandescent cadmium reds and cinnabar, ochres, burnt siennas. Yet within the burn, color settles into fields of pallor, Naples yellow, auroral orange, ash-blue. There is no pure black, no unblemished white, only broken hues, altered, fused into matter.

Clarity shifts. Zones of mist suspend reading; what seems distant sometimes appears more precise than what surfaces. Another temporality emerges, atmospheric, then physical, requiring the gaze to move from painting to painting in order to grasp what unfolds: a form or counter-form, a resin-filled hollow, an inverted horizon that obstructs and then draws the eye inward again. Ras sustains a delicate equilibrium of excess and withdrawal. The emotional intensity and forces she summons are not dissipated in wood dust; they demand to be endured, yielding only to those willing to expose themselves to them.

What unfolds here can be received only through engagement, physically.

One foot in the earth.

• Carin Klonowski

ROSE RAS

Rose Ras (b. 2001, St Jean du Sud, Haïti, lives and works in Paris), a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, is a young artist thriving through painting and sculpture. After studying applied arts from 2016 to 2018, she discovered in visual arts a deeply resonant means of expression.

Education:

. 2023-2025, DNSAP : Beaux-arts de Paris (master)

. 2020-2023, DNA : Beaux-arts de Paris (license)

. 2019, Classe préparatoire d’art plastique, Grand Paris sud

. 2018, Bac STD2A (Design)

Solo Exhibitions:

. March 2026, One foot deep, a light within, VIN VIN, Vienna

. June 2025, Magilus Antiquus - Diplôme at Beaux Arts, Paris

. January 2025, Burning Bush, CONTRAPPUNTO, VIN VIN, Vienna

Group Exhibitions:

. October 2025, VIN VIN x _POLIMENO, VIN VIN in collaboration with Valerio Polimeno, Paris

. January 2025, Les étranges bruits d’en bas, la Corvée, curated by Anaïs Mathurin et Nora Diaby, Paris

. 2024, Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing if I saw it, Modernanimalgalery, curated by David Iselin and Finn Canonica, Zurich

. 2023, Eclosion des talents, curated by Nadia Candet on invitation of Private Choice, Paris

. 2023, Ferrovia, curated by the tchoutchou collective, Maison Fraternelle, Paris

. 2023, La nuit, curated by the RVB collective, Floréal Belleville, Paris

. 2022, Speed dating, Motorenhalle, Dresden, Germany

. 2022, Speed dating, Theâtre des expositions, curated by Nina Childress, Paris

. 2022, Indicible merveille, in collaboration with the association HaÏlylyne, curated by Rose Ras, Paris

Residencies

. 2026, Residency at House of Hulda, village of Stave, Island of Andoya, Norway

. 2025, Residency at la Chapelle St Antoine in Naxos, Greece

. 2024, Residency at the 25 Hours Hotel Langstrasse, Zurich