Sophie Fernet, (born in 1984) is a franco-norwegian painter and architect, she lives and works in Innlandet, Norway. She develops a multidisciplinary practice (painting, writing, ceramics), where the mediums influence one another. With a particular sensitivity to music, she seeks to translate it into chromesthetic portraits.
The first time, I was a student. Theme: painting with music. Everyone had the same automatisms, like a conductor’s baton, beating the rhythm with the brush and whatever color came to hand. And then that whistle of the saxophone—brief, intense, yellow. I covered my sheet with it. A yellow saxophone—nothing to get worked up about. I got my diploma, stopped painting, and threw myself into life. Into DWGs, DASs, LDCs, and BIMs. Fifteen years without music or painting. Life goes on, and it tries to bring you back to your painting. Life goes on, and the desire for music returns. A chance encounter, a track downloaded without listening to it, and it matches. You don’t know why, and it obsesses you. You want to paint it large, losing yourself in that music. The canvas is ready, the portrait sketched. You feel good and put on your headphones. At the first note, there is only red. It covers everything, that magenta. Then khaki arrives. The same song, still in your ears. But it’s not what you wanted to paint. So you continue. You keep listening. 10. 20. 30 times. Maybe 60. You dive into the details of his mouth and their voices. His curls and their whisper. The experience has drained you. You want to stop everything, but all these people who touch you, these pieces of music that reach you—you can’t. And each time, different colors. Chromostesia. The word came several months later. Studies are clear: without emotion, there is no color. So it is always the same color that returns. And inevitably, you will always add that touch of turquoise in the light of his forehead. Every time. Every time you have it on your brush and in your ears. The first notes give you the first impression. You feel the chord, the notes in the key. Often it’s the dominant color, often just one, but with experience you get the full chord. Two, sometimes three colors. It’s your chromatic circle of the chord. The shadows of violet become a bluish grey, the yellows of light become pale pink, warm and cool colors emerge with time. Time—you annihilate it. Listening, listening. Looping a track explodes space-time. The piece is no longer three minutes and twenty-two seconds. It becomes a hundred, sometimes a tenth of a second. You wander through the music to better paint a detail. That green “dling” in the strands of hair at the one hundred and twenty-third second. But what do you want to paint? Not the music. No. People. A piece of their life against a piece of music. It’s your auditory memory. It leaves you in emotion. Face to face with them, in a bubble of emo-sound. That’s where your brain delights. Crossing stories, emotions. The portrait gives the form, the music gives the color. A branching thought with two trees whose branches intertwine. A form, or a non-form? The face? A non-form! Always moving, yet shift it by a millimeter and it’s a stranger. Form is an insignificant detail. It’s only a support that places all the dimensions of music into two dimensions. The trumpet solo in the background, the warm voice in the shadows. Shadows and light set the tone and place them in the orchestra pit. The melody? Abstraction. More or less abstract. The lyrics? Figuration. More or less figurative. The figurative portrait searching for the abstraction of color. Sometimes it’s perfect symbiosis, sometimes there is dissonance. Not one disharmony, but two stories intertwining. The portrait takes over. Their life, their anger, their suffering or joy explodes onto the canvas. The music soothes it, supports it, or tempers it. Perfect symbiosis—I experienced it once. It’s so easy to paint, too easy. You doubt. But in the end, it’s the canvas you don’t want to part with. Dissonance is human complexity. Suffering and support, despair and resilience. So you explore. The same portrait with two pieces of music. On two canvases, on the same canvas. The same music on two lives. Sometimes music has the color of our eyes, the chromatic circle of our life. It’s strange when a brown voice or a flesh-pink piano meets the skin of the canvas. It’s strange and rare. Finding the matching music—hours of listening. Everything and nothing. Then you want a stronger dose. Symbiosis as a ready-made dish. When singers lay themselves bare in their lyrics. When they shout it. When they express it as much in their voice, their music, as on their face. Capturing that moment. They give everything. Form and color. And then experience. You begin to feel these colors outside your painting bubble. The color is less precise, more blurred, but you feel it. The warm grey of a voice. Sometimes it’s an explosion. The piece ripples through the space of your life. That bluish curtain. An aurora borealis in broad daylight. Then it’s their voice you want. Just their voice. No song. No melody. A speech full of rage, a bottomless conversation. You capture the sounds of emotion. Synesthesia, for me, is an association of ideas. So fast that you only perceive the color. Your absolute pitch. But its composer will turn it into a monochrome or an explosion of color. A symphony orchestra explores the whole palette, jazz deconstructs it, electronic music invents new colors. It also gives you rhythm. Gesture and patience. A dancer on canvas. Each musical detail and your relative pitch takes over. The brown scrape of a guitar, the lemon-green of violins, the grey clicks are the thirds. The simple pink tremor of a voice, the perfect fifth. Because what matters most is emotion. But when is the canvas finished? Sometimes when you have plunged into the abyss of details, sometimes long before, for fear of diluting the intensity of emotion. The canvas is finished not when you’ve found resemblance like a grail. But when you hear. When you hear the colors. When you hear the colors like an echo of their own music.