Pale Geranium Lake and Scarlet is an investigation into abstract picture-making.
Here, Kaabi-Linke has inflated her three-year-old son’s pen and colored-pencil drawing on an A4 sheet of paper into monumental size, using the same colors (Pale Geranium Lake and Scarlet) as her son before laying it onto canvas.
In reality a magnified child’s drawing, it was faithfully reproduced according to Kaabi-Linke’s conceptual print-based strategy, unfolding the small hand drawing step by step into a large-scale miniature whose reduced color profile and calligraphic momentum share qualities with the highly elaborate formal language of Abstract Expressionism.
For Kaabi-Linke, this work is about the idea of an impossible painting—impossible in its proportions, technique, and logic. On a vastly magnified scale, the artist has replicated her two-year-old son’s quick drawing with tens of thousands of individual strokes using colored pencil and ballpoint pen, mirroring his use of the same pencil and pen in his own drawing.
— Asma Al Shabibi
