The Power of Color in Art: Black and Red in Marina Fedorova’s Works

Do you have a story or a moment when red or black first became not just a background, but the main character in your work?

I think it happened at the very beginning of my career. My first training was in graphic art. My graduation project at the Roerich Art School was a project developed for Tatyana Parfyonova’s fashion house, Sphere, and it used only three colors: red, black, and white. This is my favorite palette.

At first, it was dictated by technique: white was the paper, black was ink, and red was acrylic paint — or even simply red paper. When working in oil, I often paint monochrome works using only white and black. Red is an accent, an intensification of effect, a point of emphasis.

But in the series Dinner in Red, red became the main character. It dictated the dramaturgy of the entire work; like theatrical lighting, it attracted, disturbed, and hypnotized all at once. And in the project Black, black ceased to be a color and became a state. It was no longer a background or a decorative element, but a space of silence, expectations, and inner tension. In this series, black is not outer space, but a starless night, the black waters of the sea, a black stone hanging over the chest, it is that moment when form still exists and yet is already dissolving.

How do you choose colors for a work? When you begin a new work, does color come first, or does it follow the idea?

Usually, the idea and the color arise almost simultaneously, as a sensation. But this works differently in different series. For example, in Dinner in Red, color was the starting point. I wanted to create a space in which the viewer would literally find themselves inside red, inside an anxious celebration, a surreal performance. Red became the architecture of the project: the walls, the light, the objects, and the works themselves. In Black, by contrast, everything began with an inner state — a feeling of fragility, silence, tension before rupture. Only afterward did black appear as the only possible environment for that state. It seemed to absorb everything superfluous, leaving only form, light, and inner vibration.

Red and black carry a powerful cultural burden — passion, death, power. Do you use the cultural codes of color as a tool or as material for reinterpretation?

More as material for reinterpretation. I am interested in the fact that color is never neutral; we all read it through culture, history, and personal memory. Red can simultaneously be the color of love, revolution, blood, celebration, or anxiety. It always contains beauty and, at the same time, a sense of danger. Black is the color of elegance and mourning. The combination of black and red is my favorite, like Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black.

In Dinner in Red, red is associated with an excess of life, with theater, ritual, and an almost baroque emotionality, like red velvet curtains or the canopy of a royal bed. In Rupture, black is the earth’s embers, and red is lava, the open wound of the landscape. There, red is no longer decorative or theatrical. It is almost physical, like a flash of pain or memory.

After red and black, is there a color that currently attracts or troubles you? Where is your dialogue with color moving next?

Every color has its own beauty. Many of my works are dominated by white. My series Blue Orchids, created for ART021, was painted entirely in cobalt. And in summer, I spend a lot of time in nature, which is where green finds me. I feel genuinely inspired by it, and it shows up in my palette more and more during those months.