COLOR
"We favor the simple expression of the complex thought."
M. Rothko
From where can one begin, if painture has taken paths as diverse as unapproachable, far from the line, from the form, in space, until it reaches its most elementary fidelity, that of being the art of color. Color for its own sake.
"Pure color! Everything must be sacrificed to it."
P. Gauguin
Classical painting is distinguished by its predominance of form over the medium and even the subject. With the successive advances (in terms of diversification) of art, certain principles have been brought together; one of the most crucial of which is the importance of content and the relationship with the observer. If we start from the color itself and therefore from the material, the dependence and interaction as it comes into contact with the observer, what first and foremost becomes real is not only as material but as perception. The relativity of this contact becomes essential in the work and its evolution. As J Albers would say "One and the same color evokes innumerable readings." The gaze changes, inward.
"The object of most of our color studies is to demonstrate that color is the most relative of the media that art employs, that we almost never perceive what it is physically."
Albers J
Colors behave themselves, as observers, and influence each other depending on their position and moment, which creates subjections, interactions, contradictions, and above all appearances. This relativity creates an inherent illusion, all of these have one.
"He who claims to see colors independent of their illusionary changes fools only himself, and no one else."
Albers J
Among the essential properties discovered in the development of painting, the flatness of the image stands out, making any attempt to create an illusion of three-dimensional space meaningless. This illusion had played a predominant role in art in general, as an imitation of nature. It was only with the abandonment of line and later form as predominant elements that the illusion shifted to play a more perceptual role. The abandonment of mimetic illusion, which allows the development of an ever stronger union between the form of the image and its surface, and the achievement of compositional balance, mark the direction of the evolutionary process of painting, historically conditioned.
"We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."
M. Rothko
There are several statements that favor the use of color as a privileged medium of art. The main one is to make an interior visible, with the senses, in other words, to create significant illusions that modify a space. We follow J Albers when he says "In order to use colour effectively it is necessary to recognise that colour deceives continually." To be means to appear. And this does not mean something that is added later, something that being can encounter by chance. Being is essentially insofar as it appears.
"Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible."
P Klee
We must begin by saying that we cannot say anything conclusively about color without taking into account the consummate experience of the image and the viewer.
“… color is a means of exercising direct influence upon the soul."
Kandinsky
You could list the essentials, such as that the artist makes the viewer see a world, and points it out. Or following Rothko to "see the world our way-not his way." We can clarify the way in which appearance and being come together in making visible but all this would play an accessory role without the observer reading himself, being resonated by the colors, which make clear calls and stun his common sense. Or as J. Albers does, we "prefer to see with closed eyes".
"A thing is never seen as it really is."
J Albers
Bibliography
* The interaction of color, J Albers.
* Open letter to the New York Times by A Gottlieb and M Rothko.
