From island to island in resonance with Édouard Glissant

“And the whole island finally reposes, In the heat of ripeness,

Ripe is the silence upon the city, Ripe the star in hunger.”

Édouard Glissant, “A Field of Islands”, 1965

Nathalie Beras, born on the same island as the archipelagic philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, decided to make this poem her own, as she shared his conviction that “we are islands connected to one another”.

Her unique paintings are the fruits of international travel and a plural identity guided by the ideal and the joyful quest for a better life. Nathalie Beras found in Édouard Glissant, the poet who celebrated intermix, the same need for creation as a connection - to oneself and to others - a garden secretly shared, where “I make myself into ocean, where the child shall dream”. Her islands take the forms of the places where she has lived or dreams of living: the île Saint-Germain, Martinique, Tahiti, Cuba…

Thus, Nathalie Beras allows possibilities open to the high seas to weave themselves into her paintings, extended towards her contemporaries, who also dream, with the poets and painters, that “I is an island” and that we are all archipelagos.