Pink: A Stigmatized Color

 

Kirkis Rrose is a French artist born in 1988 working with the color pink. He is a PhD student in art and gender studies in Paris, combining theory and practice around this singular and unappreciated color: Pink. 

"What interests me in colors, is that," as wrote French historian Michel Pastoureau, "before being a perception, a feeling, they first are concepts, ideas, intellectual categories." What color is more categorizing than pink? 

Compared to other colors, Pink has a short history and is not even defined in some languages, but that does not prevent it from developing its own system of symbols. Synonymous with femininity, tenderness, romance, and sentimentality, Pink also evokes eroticism and pornography. Subversive, pink is taken today by gay communities, and many artists and queer movements have now appropriated this color to reveal, expose, and overcome its gendered, categorizing, and sometimes stigmatizing symbolism. 

I'm interested in the story of this color, considering technical and artistic points of view as much as cultural and social perspectives. I seek to understand how and why this floral color has become stigmatized. 

Articulating body and color, language and art history, gender studies and feminism, queer and punk cultures, conceptual and body art, my monochromatic work is rich in my activism, lightweight and shifted, taking advantage of all the pink ambiguities, especially linguistic. I play with the symbolism of this childlike color, contrasting its sweet naivety with raw sexuality or disturbing messages. 

http://www.kirkisrrose.com

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