Collection reflection on color

Didactique et dialectique de la couleur, 48 panneaux. Caracas, 1959

 

 

Reflection on color

“For a long time, the general public and even the art world have institutionalized solely the information on color that stops with impressionism, Matisse, Delaunay, and Albers.
There are many who say argue that color is only good for coloring the form and that it is only useful for making beautiful or ugly combinations; that color is banal and that it’s a closed chapter.

 

Those opinions increased my enthusiasm. Given that we live in an ‘extremely-polychromed-baroque’ society, it seemed quite strange to me that nobody could be bothered to question the established idea of color.

I was able to show that our relationship with the world of color is deeply emotional. Our chromatic decisions are not as rational as we think. ‘Why can’t I stand that red and yellow together?... I like this blue, but not that one.

 

 

It’s a fact that we have no visual memory for color. All we remember is ‘generic blue,’ ‘generic red.’ Never a shade. This is because the chromatic event is the product of ‘random circumstances,’ such as light, intensity, opacity, distance and material, among others.
A good example of this problem can be seen in the case of a person who returns home to realize that the shade of color he or she chose in the shop is not the one he or she had assumed to be.

 

The cultural conditioning based on the ‘devotion to form and shape’ prevents us from understanding the subtle events occurring in time and space.

 

The volume of visual and auditory information in modern society has made us ‘visibly deaf’ and ‘audibly blind’.

 

For centuries, the concept of motionless COLOR was understood and used in the same way: first FORM and then COLOR – that ‘something’ used to fill the form. For many, colour has been and continues to be ‘a story of form’.

 

With my work I am proposing AUTONOMOUS COLOR, devoid of symbols, as an evolving event that absorbs us.

 

Through my chromatic research I am trying to display colour as an EPHEMERAL AUTONOMOUS SITUATION– color in continuous mutation creating AUTONOMOUS REALITIES.

 

‘Realities’ because they occur in time and space. ‘Autonomous’ because they don’t depend on the story the spectator is used to seeing in a painting. This establishes another dialectic between the spectator and the work, which in turn generates a learning situation.

 

The spectator can discover his or her ability to make and unmake color with his or her own means of perception, as well as , detecting its emotional resonance.”

 

Carlos Cruz-Diez
Caracas 1989