"Painting is my first love but I've always loved photography. I particularly enjoy manipulating images with different tools to create imaginary worlds, portraits from elsewhere, surrealist landscapes. I glue, dissect, superimpose, colour... I don't do it with my brush but with a computer. My aim is the same as with my painting, to take you on a journey with me into my imaginary world... welcome to my planet!"

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Corine Ko’s artistic process fuses photography and painting. Reworking her photographs with the eye of a painter, she integrates heterogeneous elements to generate original digital collages. Photography is literally embedded in her canvases, lending the work a soul and substance that is enhanced by the colours of the painting.

She also sometimes uses shreds of torn paper or lace to add relief to the work and animate the surface with splashes of bright colour. She creates silhouettes that do not have a clear outline; the shapes are defined by pure colour, allowing them to escape, spread and dissolve.

It is this exuberance that is particularly striking in Ko’s work; the wilful freedom with which colour reigns supreme in a universe without spatial or temporal points of reference. In this depthless space the subjects sometimes seem to be caught in a state of suspension or equilibrium; the thread is the only point of contact with the world and between beings.

Being connected, maintaining a link, not losing the thread, is perhaps one of the keys to understanding her enigmatic work. The thread that wanders from one painting to another as an obsessive leitmotif is much more than an incidental accessory: it is at once the thread of life with which the subjects are playing.

From one work to the next, a sensual and poetic feminine universe is emerging, filled with softness, grace and mystery.

Originally from the Paris area, Corine Ko has lived and worked in Marseille since 1998.