To stand before the canvases of Amartya (Joëlle Zioga) is to encounter a field where material facture dissolves into an atmosphere of apparition. In her “Blue Collection,” a body of work she confesses is closest to her heart, color is not merely pigment but ontology: a register of being that presses beyond the retinal into the metaphysical. Blue and green, her chosen chromatic poles, are not incidental hues but coordinates of psychic orientation, elemental substances through which memory, dream, and infinity are refracted.

In Mon Ange Guardian (2023), the work soon to be unveiled at the Biennale in Florence, Amartya situates us within a celestial chiaroscuro. The brush does not so much depict as summon; branches stretch into indigo voids, blossoms flare as phosphorescent signs, and the surrounding atmosphere vibrates with an auratic presence. The angel here is not iconographic but structural: a figure that inhabits the very weave of paint, luminous and elusive, both absent and manifest. This canvas sets the tone for her larger project, painting as invocation, as the transubstantiation of grief and memory into vision.

Amartya’s self-taught path carries with it the audacity of an unorthodox apprenticeship. Emerging from a background in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lausanne, she wields philosophy not as academic ballast but as a subterranean current. The name she has chosen, “Amartya,” Hindi for “One Who Never Dies,” marks a turning away from the linear biography of professional formation toward a mythopoetic trajectory. The dream of her late father becomes genesis, anchoring her practice in the liminal space where mourning cohabits with creation.

Her recognition in Luxembourg, Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, and soon Florence underscores not only her reception within the institutional art world but also her singular voice in the contemporary field: a voice that refuses neat categorization. Her layered canvases inhabit a threshold between Surrealism’s dream-logic and the textural abstraction of postwar gesturalism. And yet they are neither homage nor pastiche. They are charged with an intensely personal iconography: trees, blossoms, spectral forms, liquid atmospheres, that function less as representation than as mnemonic cipher.

Secret Garden (2025) situates the viewer within a verdant dreamscape where blue-limned trees stand like sentinels over a peacock unfurling into mist. The scene hovers between figuration and abstraction: forms are legible yet spectral, staged in a zone where reality slips toward reverie. Here, Amartya stages the “garden” not as a pastoral cliché but as an archetype of an enclosure of origins, at once womb and cosmos.

In Under the Sea (2024), textures become marine palimpsests: thick impasto strokes press upward, crowned by glimmers of silver that read simultaneously as coral, constellations, or the residue of memory itself. The work establishes a continuity between depths and heavens, where the abyssal floor echoes the night sky.

Before Midnight (2025) pivots toward the dramatic. Its red incandescence, surrounded by an architecture of blue and black strokes, summons both window and wound. The composition enacts a dialectic: the rational grid fractured by gestural incursions, the luminous heart pressed against encroaching darkness. Midnight is not temporal here but ontological: the passage between knowable presence and ineffable absence.

For Amartya, color is not an accessory but a destiny. The blue that dominates Blue Dream (2024), Blue Night (2022), and Gone with the Wind (2025) is not the modernist monochrome of Yves Klein nor the detached opticality of Color Field painting. It is closer to what Gaston Bachelard called the “intimate immensity” of the imagination: a chromatic expanse where self and cosmos interpenetrate. Blue is here, both elemental water and infinite sky, a vehicle of longing, of mourning, of transcendence.

The pinks and violets that infiltrate Enchanted Woods (2025) or Once Upon a Magnolia (2025) do not rupture this chromatic order but complicate it, introducing pulses of flesh, desire, and temporal blossoming. They remind us that Amartya’s canvases are not only meditations on infinity but also on the fragile, transient beauty of life lived.

Amartya’s biography threads itself through every gesture. That she is self-taught matters not as anecdote but as philosophical posture: she paints without academic lineage, without formal constraint, from a locus where memory and dream are primary sources. Her canvases operate as sites of transmission. The spectral blossoms in Mon Ange Guardian or the skeletal branches of Blue Night are less botanical motifs than figures of recurrence, emblems of return.

If these works lean toward the Symbolist, it is because they partake in that tradition’s project: to render visible what is invisible, to materialize absence. But whereas Symbolism often indulged in allegorical fixity, Amartya’s iconography remains fluid, suspended between figuration and dissolution. In this sense, her practice recalls the late work of Odilon Redon not as stylistic imitation, but as a shared commitment to images as vehicles of interior vision.

The contemporary art field, saturated with irony and conceptual detachment, rarely allows for the unabashed metaphysical. Amartya, however, insists on it. Her canvases neither apologize for nor obscure their transcendental aspirations. In doing so, she restores to painting a function that modernity often sought to sever: the conduit between the sensible and the spiritual.

This insistence matters. At a time when art is frequently subsumed into spectacle or commodified surface, Amartya offers instead the labor of depth. Her works invite not consumption but contemplation; they ask not for instant recognition but for patient inhabitation. They are slow paintings in an accelerated culture, their luminosity unfolding in time rather than in a glance.

Mon Ange Guardian anchors this symbolic field. The angel here is not figural but structural, a condensation of light within texture. The painting reminds us that the angel is always a messenger, always a threshold: between mortality and immortality, between finite and infinite. In Amartya’s hands, the angel becomes not dogma but metaphor, an emblem for painting itself as a messenger between visible pigment and invisible vision.

The trees recurring across her oeuvre, sometimes blossoming, sometimes skeletal, echo this angelic logic. They stand as mediators: rooted in earth yet reaching toward sky, living diagrams of vertical transcendence.

It is tempting to read Amartya’s works purely in biographical terms, dreams of her father, self-taught vocation, and the therapeutic process of grief sublimated into art. But to stop there would be to diminish their philosophical resonance. What matters is not the personal anecdote but the universal logic it discloses: the human need to render the invisible visible, to articulate the unsayable.

Her paintings are thus not only personal exorcisms but metaphysical inquiries. They stage the question: how does one paint memory? How does one render in pigment what is by definition evanescent? Each canvas is an experiment in that impossible task.

Among predecessors, it is Odilon Redon who seems the most apt analogue. Like Redon, Amartya treats painting as a site where dream and vision attain materiality. Like Redon, she employs flowers, spectral figures, and atmospheric voids as metaphors for psychic states. Yet where Redon often veered toward the hallucinatory, Amartya’s voice is quieter, more contemplative, attuned less to nightmare than to elegy. Her canvases are not assaults on reality but meditations upon its dissolution into light.

To speak of Amartya’s place in contemporary art is to acknowledge her resistance to the dominant logics of the market and the academy. Her work is not ironic, not cynical, not driven by theory as fashion. It is, instead, a profound commitment to painting as a spiritual exercise.

This matters not only aesthetically but socially. In an age marked by fragmentation, dislocation, and despair, Amartya’s paintings offer spaces of re-enchantment. They remind us that art can still serve as an instrument of consolation, of transcendence, of communion with what exceeds us.

The forthcoming exhibition of Mon Ange Guardian at the Florence Biennale will not merely showcase an individual work but will signal the arrival of an artist whose project is nothing less than to restore to painting its metaphysical vocation.

Amartya’s canvases (Mon Ange Guardian, Secret Garden, Under the Sea, Before Midnight, Blue Dream, Blue Night, Enchanted Woods, Gone with the Wind, Once Upon a Magnolia, and others) form not a series of discrete works but a constellation. Together, they articulate a visual philosophy: painting as a threshold between tangible and transcendent, as a site where grief transfigures into vision, as a practice that insists upon the immortality of the human spirit.

That she is self-taught only deepens the resonance of this achievement. For what her practice demonstrates is that true artistry arises not from institutional sanction but from existential necessity. To paint, for Amartya, is not a career but a calling.

And it is precisely this necessity, the urgency of making visible what cannot otherwise be seen, that grants her a singular place within the contemporary art scene. Her art does not merely belong to the present; it gestures toward the eternal.

Her contribution, then, is not only to visual culture but to cultural memory itself. In a world increasingly dominated by screens and fleeting digital images, her paintings insist on materiality, the drag of the brush across canvas, the depth of layered pigment, the glint of metallic leaf catching the light at different hours of the day. They require presence. To stand before her work is to acknowledge that perception is temporal, that vision unfolds across duration. This is perhaps her most radical gesture: to reintroduce slowness into a visual economy of acceleration.

At the same time, her metaphysical project resonates beyond aesthetic experience. Amartya’s art addresses the collective need for orientation in moments of uncertainty. The trees she paints, endlessly branching and bending, are diagrams of resilience. The blossoms, glowing like spectral flames, remind us that beauty survives even under the shadow of loss. The peacock in Secret Garden, with its poised elegance, embodies a quiet triumph of being. These are not mere images but emblems of survival, of continuity.

In this sense, Amartya stands as an artist of consolation. Not consolation as denial, but as transformation, where grief is neither hidden nor erased but transfigured into luminous form. This is why her presence at the Florence Biennale will matter: it is not simply an exhibition but a testimony, a reminder that painting still has the power to heal, to gather, to illuminate the spaces where words fall silent.

Amartya’s work insists that art must not only be looked at but lived with, that in the gestures of blue and green, in the shadows of midnight and the light of blossoms, we are invited to confront both our finitude and our infinity. This is her gift to the contemporary moment: a vision rooted in personal memory yet resonant with universal desire, a practice that brings us back to painting not as object, but as an encounter with the eternal.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine