Eva Biedert Roulet

“My hands are my language; they are my means of expression.” This is how Eva Biedert Roulet describes the creation of her paintings. After taking a family break in the 90s during which the artist didn’t paint, she started to convey her delightful use of colour and surreal fantasies to canvas. Several of the pictures created during the last two decades conceal older paintings underneath them. Those that no longer satisfy or are representative of her artistic development are painted over without hesitation.

«I speak with my hands»

Eva Biedert Roulet’s technique and style is driven by movement, speed and energy. Nowadays, she uses pen, pencil and crayon along with acrylic colour. “I paint several layers; they give the painting structure and direction. At the centre of my work is the greatest possible reduction.” Eva Biedert Roulet explains that there is a separate picture repository in her mind, a place where she stores all of the impressions of her everyday life and surroundings, nature and twilight musings. “The stored images provide the first impulse to begin work on a painting. While painting however it is my hands that guide my way. My hands are my language and they create their own image – independently from my head.”

Colour is key

Choice and combination of colour plus the drawing of lines are the striking elements in Eva Biedert Roulet’s works. “Colour – and form – is essential to me. I have a close relationship to colours and study them intensely. Even as a child.” The artist adds “I used to paint all the time. I remember a giant box of crayons, which I sorted again and again according to the colour wheel and with which I drew my first patterns. Only after enrolling in the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, did I begin to paint figuratively. In paintings I made around 1998 there are still figures, which is to say pictorial elements. But nowadays I am no longer interested in figurative painting, with its overly clear and definitive messages. I am more interested in stimulating the observer’s imagination by evoking different moods through colour and spontaneous lines. Form is still present, but in another manner quite distinguishable.

Every colour has a life of its own

The importance of colours is especially important to Eva Biedert Roulet: “For me, each colour has a life of its own. At the moment my paintings consist of a lot of white, while green, blue and yellow are prominently used as well. In my earlier work, the colours were juxstaposed in poignant, almost painful contrasts. This has changed exchanged over the years. Today pastel shades of colour have come into their own, and the soft, subtle tones.”

^{Christine Valentin}