COLETTE LEINMAN
A Threshold, Not a Window
In the vast and often over-signified landscape of contemporary art, Colette Leinman’s work makes a radical proposition: that the self may not need to be fully rendered to be present. Her paintings—layered with ghostly traces, fragmented forms, and palimpsestic gestures—offer a cartography not of identity, but of its erasure.
In the saturated spectacle of contemporary image-making, Colette Leinman offers no stable gaze, no fixed form. Her canvases are not windows to a subject—but thresholds to its undoing. One crosses them not to see, but to sense. What appears is not the self, but its shadow. The remnants. A breath caught mid-evaporation.
The Absence That Asks
Where is the place for the individual—when the lines of the body blur, when the face becomes a whisper, when meaning dissolves like ink in water?
What we encounter in Leinman’s canvases is not the individual as subject, but the absence of such certainty. The figure flickers in and out of being, a residue of form rather than its affirmation. One does not “see” the body in her work so much as one senses its withdrawal. This visual strategy aligns her with a lineage of artists interrogating the collapse of stable subjecthood—Francis Bacon’s existential deformities, Wols’ abstract figuration, even traces of Christian Boltanski’s memorialization of absence.
Leinman’s work does not resolve this question. It becomes it. Her figures do not assert being; they question it. They do not stand. They drift—between presence and vanishing, scream and silence, memory and forgetting. The self, here, is fugitive.
Eye of the Cyclone #6, Acrylic on paper - 103 x 78.5 cm
Fragments of Becoming
Her so-called N’hommades—neither men nor women, neither ghosts nor gods—inhabit a realm of suspension. They are not symbols, but symptoms. Not representations, but resonances. Scribbled, veiled, eroded—like thoughts on the edge of waking, or names the wind once carried. Their ontology is partial. Their power, precisely in their incompletion.
This strategy is not merely formal. It is ontological.
In a world where meaning is increasingly performative, commodified, and algorithmically constructed, Leinman insists on opacity. On not being fully known. On resisting capture—whether by gaze, narrative, or political frame.
Coco & Simba. Acrylic on paper mashe - 17 x 8 x 34 cm.
The Refusal to Be Framed
Leinman resists the economy of recognition. In a world obsessed with hyper-visibility, she reclaims the right to opacity. To not being fully known. Her gesture is philosophical: the figure fades, not to disappear, but to escape capture—by image, by narrative, by identity itself. The absurd, in the Camusian sense, haunts every corner of her canvas. The figures appear mid-disappearance, caught in the act of vanishing. Yet their partiality is precisely what gives them emotional weight. They are vestiges—of memory, desire, exile, and existence itself. They refuse the logic of representation, yet remain deeply human.
Canvases That Murmur
Her palette, often dominated by liminal hues—ethereal blues, bruised grays, bleeding whites—contributes to the sense of immateriality. These are not colors of affirmation, but of reverberation; they evoke not form, but atmosphere. They are colors that tremble.
Her paintings do not speak. They murmur. Blue does not just appear—it haunts. A chromatic melancholy seeps through: not as hue, but as atmosphere, as residue. These are not colors of form, but of aftermath. They do not mark objects. They mark time.
The Question of the Human
What, then, is the viewer to do in front of such absence?
Leinman does not offer resolution, and that may be the most critical gesture of all. She resists the viewer’s desire for recognition. There is no catharsis here, no decipherable subject. Instead, she poses a challenge: Can you stay with the void? Can you see the individual when the figure is no longer whole?
Leinman’s work sits at the crossroads of abstraction and figuration, not to reconcile the two, but to destabilize both. Her paintings become speculative fields where the human is always on the verge of becoming, or unbecoming. The absurd is not merely a theme—it is the very structure of her aesthetic.
In a time where identity is increasingly tied to visibility and legibility, Colette Leinman offers a different ethic: the right to opacity, to ambiguity, to silent persistence.
Her work does not speak.
It murmurs.
And in that murmur, something profoundly human remains.
- Editor, Mika (Jaeyun) Noh, Seoul, South Korea, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery
Astral Meeting (Deep Blue Collection), 2024. Mixed media/Cardboard - 40 x 100 cm
Biography
CV
Colette Leinman, born in Mont-Saint-Aignan, France, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Israel. Her artistic discipline encompasses painting, installation art, and video art, with a particular focus on mixed media on cardboard and oil on canvas. Leinman is best known for her experimental approach, particularly her use of different shades of blue in her collections. Even when employing conventional techniques like oil painting, she applies them in an unconventional manner, using extremely thin, lacquer-like layers that require extended drying times.
Leinman’s work delves into abstract and experimental art, characterized by her meticulous layering and innovative use of color. Her important projects include the “Deep Blue Collection,” which showcases her mastery of blue hues and layering techniques, and “N’hommades,” a series that further explores her abstract and experimental themes. Her unique approach and dedication to experimentation distinguish her in the contemporary art scene.
Colette Leinman has exhibited her work in notable venues, including “La nuit je dessinerai des soleils” at Galerie Yad Labanim in Rishon Letsion, Israel; “Le Goût du bleu” at Galerie SAGA in Jaffa, Israel; and “Le Goût du bleu II” at Citoyens à Caen in Caen, France. Her works are held in prestigious collections such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Foundation Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty Art Collection, and the Arturo Schwartz collection in Milan, Italy. Additionally, her pieces are part of the AKIM Decorated Masks at Sotheby’s Auction in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and various private collections worldwide, including those of the Stern Family in New York and M. Wolkowicz in Paris.
Selected Solo Shows
2023 La nuit je dessinerai des soleils, Galerie Yad Labanim, Rishon Letsion, Israel
2022 Le Goût du bleu, Galerie SAGA, Jaffa, Israel.
Le Goût du bleu II, Citoyens à Caen, Caen, France.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2026 In Search of Habitable Futures, curated by Siddhant Khattri, Susan Fraser-Hughes and Rajul Shah, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Mumbai, India
2025 The Warrior Empath, curated by Dorron Britz, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Paris, France
2025 Parasitó, in collaboration with the Consulate of Mexico in Mumbai, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Mumbai, India
2025 La Rupture du Désir, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Paris, France
2024 The Power of Blue, Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Mumbai, India
2023 Shades of Israel – My Altneuland (curator: Flametta Maregani), Dystopia II; Jewish Museum of Lecce, Italy.
The Road to the Pole, Litvak Gallery, Tel-Aviv, July –October 2023.
Dystopia, The Art and Soul of Tel Aviv-Yafo; Kalisher (curator: Flametta Maregani), Autumn 2023, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Selected Collections
AKIM Decorated Masks, Sotheby’s Auction, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Artists Messengers of Peace, Dr. Fisher Art for Peace, Israel.
Arturo Schwartz, Milan, Italy.
Foundation Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty Art Collection, Israel.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.
J-L. Sebag, Paris, France.
M. Wolkowicz, Paris, France.
Stern Family, New-York, USA.
World Club Travel, London, England.
Selected Publications
“Building the collective ethos of the surrealist group” in The Exhibition Catalogue in Ethos Collectif et Identités sociales, Prof. R.Amossy (dir.), Ed. Garnier Classique, pp. 193-209, Paris, France (2021).
“Creation of the Artistic Patrimony in the ‘Musée de poche’ collection, in L’image de l’écrivain dans les collections demonographies illustrées D. Martens, G. Yanoshevsky, (director) (Nottingham French Studies, Edinburgh University Press, England (2019).
Les catalogues d’expositions surréalistes à Paris entre 1924 et 1939, N.Y. Ed. Rotopi/Brill, Amsterdam, (2015).
“A catalogue of a Dali exhibition on Art” in How to speak on art? Semiotic and discursive approaches, Melissa Barkat-Defradas and Stephanie Benoist (director), CNRS Editions, Paris, France (2013).
Publication of Poems and Works of art in « Continuum », Review of writers of French expression in Israel. (2013 – 2023).
Professional Contributions
2007-2024 Member of the research Group ADARR (Research), the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
2024 Poems’ translation from Hebrew to French with Ilai Rovner: “poems of October 7” Makom Leshira with the collaboration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2022 Auction in favor of the “Greater than life” Association, Paris
2000-2024 Member of the Association of Israeli Writers of French Expression
2005-2007 Member of the Museum Committee at the Ministry of Education and Sport.
2011 Co-organizer of the Poetry evening at the Tel-Aviv French Institute: “Poèmes d’amour sur Rotchild”
2006 Co-organizer of the International Symposium, “Paul Cézanne 1906-2006” – Process and reception, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
2004 Co-editor with David Mendelson; Claude Vigée traducteur : “Toute langue en ce monde est d’abord un exil’, Emergence des Francophonies, Limoges, ed. Presses Universitaires de Limoges
Education
2007 – 2011 Ph.D. The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
Doctoral thesis: “Catalogs of surrealist exhibitions”, 1924-1938″, under the supervision of Professor Ruth mossy.
1998 – 2000 M.A. The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
Thesis: “The deletion of the subject in René Magritte’s visual and verbal artwork”, under the supervision of Professor Ruth Amossy
1987 – 1992 B.A. French Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
1987 – 1992 B.A. French Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
1986 – 1990 The Painting and Sculpture College, Ramat-Gan, Israel
