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Color is matter. It can be a mineral powder, a vegetable substance, the result of processing substances from the animal world... we who use them impose names to recognize them: yellow and brown ochre, natural Siena earth, clear and dark madder lake, reddish violet and scarlet, cobalt violet, Mars violet, Van Dyck brown, cyclamen pink and lilac, purple... that is, warm colors that create an effect of extreme closeness and foreground.
Sky blue, aquamarine, Veronese green, turquoise blue, and brilliant violet, light cadmium yellow, manganese oxide... cold shades that serve as background and tonal contrast.
Colors are the absolute protagonists of art: they are associated by contrast and by the juxtaposition of warm and cool colors in order to allow the images to "come forward" with the contrasts of warm colors, and the horizon to "recede" towards the background thanks to cool tones.
The Chinese, with ideograms, give each color a precise image based on something everyone can recognize. For us Westerners, everything, even defining a color, is more complicated and abstract. How can we give an image that with our words can describe the zinc of cobalt, that is cerulean blue, but certainly, Our Lady's mantle. Pure abstraction. In the meantime, I would like to meet someone who has seen and known Our Lady of the Angels and seen her wearing a blue mantle, then we can talk about it.
For artists, color is one of the main tools of artistic or visual communication. With color, the artist establishes a relationship that involves all his senses, exactly as a musician with his instrument, made of smells, tactile vibrations with the material that composes the harp, the violin bow, the wood of the cello or a guitar, the ivory of a key... art means this: to build and then immerse oneself in a universe where the mind uses every sensory technique to express itself.
To imagine the infinite means trying to see it. How? For example, through its physical representation. This desire to reach with one’s mind the intangible infinite leads to two different solutions: thinking of something ethereal, impalpable, unreachable, and immeasurable (the gray sky fading into the same leaden color of the sea, the jagged line of the desert leading towards nothingness, etc.), or giving it shape, making it a work that our senses perceive, through a set of colors and signs, which also serve to tell stories (The Little Prince by A. de Saint-Exupéry, La dance by H. Matisse, Blu III by J. Miró...)
For an artist of the image, painting the infinite has always been a challenge to be undertaken. Naturally, this is not easy: drawing a space that goes beyond human comprehension requires symbols, colors, and techniques of representation. To do this, it is not enough to have an idea because, as brilliant as the intuition that comes from the intellect may be, in the end, it has to be realized and given shape.
Yves Klein, a French artist holds his first exhibition in Paris in 1955 with monochrome paintings.
The following year he invents a particular shade of blue, the color he preferred because it reminded him of the depths of the sky, and which he will call International Klein Blue (IKB), defining it as the perfect expression of blue and monochromy as the ultimate outcome of his pictorial research.
In 1960, he will be part of the Nouveaux Réalistes group, whose manifesto was drafted by Pierre Restany who wrote in an article on New Realism of 1963: "(...) Yves Klein, who died recently in Paris at the age of 34 after a meteoric career, remains the most extremist member of the group. In his 1957 Monochrome Propositions, he focuses all his expressive power inherent in the act of painting on panels uniformly covered with industrial color of a pure blue. Shortly afterwards he starts working with gold leaf, and then, turning to the intangible, he holds an exhibition of empty frames, and invents an architecture built of air along with a painting and sculpture composed of fire."
The power of the invisible and the infinite, whether it is research done in painting or in mathematics, the charm of human invention is always astounding, as Ennio De Giorgi, the mathematician who in 1957 managed to solve Hilbert's nineteenth problem after no one had been able to for more than fifty years, said: "Mathematics allows me to delve deeper into reality, to move from observing visible things to imagining invisible ones." To conclude, I juxtaposed a mathematician with an artist because both used imagination and creativity to solve one of the many problems that humanity faces: how do I represent the infinite?
Until next time.
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