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Why did Paul Gauguin use a bright red field in Vision of the Sermon?

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Self-portrait painting by Paul Gauguin showing the artist with a mustache, yellow halo, and stylized plants against a vivid orange background with green and red fruit. — Paul Gauguin Self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, oil on wood, 1889; in the Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 79.2 × 51.3 cm.

In Vision of the Sermon (1888), Paul Gauguin used a bright red field to denote the otherworldliness of the scene, which represents a vision experienced by Breton women following a sermon.1

By utilizing vivid, arbitrary color, Gauguin moved away from the objective recording of nature associated with Impressionism to instead emphasize the imagination and internal experience of the figures. The red field serves as a backdrop against which the women’s white bonnets are presented as patterns, helping to fuse the everyday world of the praying women with the dream world of the biblical vision of Jacob wrestling with the angel. This approach is a hallmark of Synthetism, a style Gauguin developed to synthesize formal elements like color planes and lines with the core idea or emotion of a subject.123