What could be a more codependent lover than colour? A loose spectrum of identities defined by association and degree. No blue is in fact true, but shades of whatever else it encounters along the way. This wheel of reason has long been canon; Goethe first observed it, Kandinsky and Klee believed it a spiritual matter, Albers, the pragmatist (who, by the way, created his colour theory in Oaxaca), taught it was all relative. Even those ambitious artists who have attempted to encompass vision with a singular pigment or light have had to contend with edges, both physical or temporal. What is the colour of the wall around the Rothko, or the floor in front of the Kelly monochromes, or the bathrooms just after leaving a Turrell perceptual cell?
But this incestuous set of relationships is only part of colour’s enmeshed love triangle. What about its entanglements with the world of experience...beyond itself? Can colour be separated from context? Saturation from meaning? Hue from symbols? Despite, or maybe exactly because of its many referential qualities, colour has evaded accuracy in language. While modern sociology tells us most humans across cultures have a low vocabulary of individual colour terms at our disposal – between single and low double digits – browse any Home Depot paint aisle and you’ll find an expansive and absurd chromatic dictionary – Whispering Peach, Dragon’s Blood, Mermaid Net, Phantom Mist, Grandma’s Sweater, Likeable Sand. These saccharine linguistics turn the built environment into a blank slate waiting to be coated in the wooing nonsense of bad haiku and gooey sonnets. But what about those equally associative names that don’t show up in marketable labels: Blooming Contusion, Fresh Puss, Clotted Blood, Peeling Scab. Are these colours truly that far outside of our array of palatable choices? Can a bouquet of roses by any other name be both Architectural Digest approved and a trauma trigger?
These are just a few of the entwined conundrums found in Palletable Relations.
In the works of Andrew Jensdotter, the artist mines the collective conscious for colour preference. Sourcing pigments from paint recycling centres, like an anthropologist, the artist collects these pigment leftover from people’s home-improvement and commercial projects and separates them by common colour distinctions. Layering hundreds of layers within a particular range onto a single canvas, he carves back into these aggregate surfaces revealing a democratic spectrum of taste.
Amber Cobb on the other hand complicates the perception between pleasing and abject colour relationships. The artist who regularly engages the aesthetics of trauma, here recreates and rearranges gradients found within bruised and wounded flesh. Casting silicon forms from the decorative patterning of a hotel mattress cover, a locus of bodily contact and experience, the artist creates patchwork skins of variously shifting hues. Arresting and seductive, these draped and bulging forms blur boundaries between attraction and repulsion using the chromatic pairings of physical violence and healing.
Oliver Marsden’s artistic practice revolves around the perception and possibilities of movement and fluidity in colour, sound and order. Using painting as a visual object that filters and reflects light, the artist portrays that every colour has its own energy and space. Marsden’s fade paintings come from colour memory; studying surfaces and reflections, he strips away the details of everyday scenes, reaching the essence.
Marsden creates paintings in which you can experience the colour in relation to itself; interacting with fragile visual tension and balance.
In Benjamín Torres’ work, colour is used as a visual tool to establish concrete and / or evocative spaces interacting with architecture elements. In this series Diario se cuela la luz, diario se fuga el color, Torres uses windows - elements that serve both as barriers and access points intervened with newspaper and paint. Closely related to painting, these works allow Torres to freely navigate through geometry, abstraction and composition. In this particular instance the extraction of colour as a form, draws attention to surrounding elements within the gallery and the street, which otherwise might go unnoticed.
Marco Treviño’s interest for the processes and materials used in his own production is often related to the social implication of colour and to the consequences of the encounter of commercial painting with the poetry used in the nomenclature of some colour sample-books (absurd chromatic dictionary). Pintura policiaca no.3 (When policemen discuss the relationship between poetry and industrial painting) reflects on the industrial landscape and the power that urban colouring has on society and questions the entities behind that decision.
Imágenes de la Exposición
Andrew Jensdotter – Cortesía de la Galería Hilario Galguera
Entrada actualizada el el 16 abr de 2018
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