Pale Geranium Lake and Canvas (Remastered)

“Pale Geranium Lake and Scarlet (remastered)” is another investigation into abstract picture-making. Here Kaabi-Linke has inflated her three-year-old son’s pen and coloured-pencil drawing on an A4 sheet of paper into monumental size, using the same colours (Pale Geranium
Lake and Scarlet) as her son before laying onto canvas.

In reality a magnified child’s drawing, it was faithfully reproduced according to Kaabi-Linke’s conceptual print-based strategy that unfolds the small hand drawing step by step into a large scale miniature whose reduced colour profile and calligraphic momentum shares 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 very 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 with colored pencil and ball point pen, mirroring his use of the same pencil and pen in his own drawing.

— Asma Al Shabibi