You have to do with it: color as an event

Madrid,

“The color arises in the most intimate of fantasy, because it is only a quality, it is not at all a substance or refers to one. That is why the colors have become symbols for those who lack fantasy. In color the eyes apply purely to the spiritual, the color saves the path of the creator through the form in nature. It allows the senses, in their pure absorption, which are directly with the spiritual, with harmony. Who sees is totally plunged into color, looking at the color means sinking the eyes into others, that devours it: the eyes of fantasy. The colors see themselves, in them the cigar look and they are their object and organ at the same time. Our eyes have colors. The color occurs in the look and color the pure look. ”

They are words of Walter Benjamin, who also expressed that there was no way to understand that notion, that of color, which exists but as a perceptual phenomenon, that it did not go through contemplation: You have to see it. That is the title that the Juan March Foundation has given to the sample that opens tomorrow in Madrid and that, curated by María Zozaya, it has been proposed not to take said color only as a thematic axis, but to try to acquire the form of exposure. His germ is in which the headquarters of this institution in Cuenca and Palma de Mallorca dedicated to Carlos Cruz-Díez in 2009, called precisely “The color happens”, which already abounded in the management of the palette by this kinetic author in terms of his experiential possibilities, and not so much theoretical: Since I started my painter adventure I have developed a deep condition for color. He believed that each brush stain applied to the fabric was a first -order affective message and an unplayable testimony to communicate. I have insisted on making color an experience, with an affective impact that surpassed any other artifice of the act of paintingsaid the Venezuelan.

It collects this project almost eighty works in different techniques (paintings, sculptures, works on paper, facilities, video, textiles, ceramics …) dated in the twentieth and twenty -first centuries -the earliest, a Malevich of 1915; the most recent, this year. Only one of them, a Hans Hinterreiter, belongs to the funds of the March and are structured, in coexistence and without sections, in the U -shaped rooms of the Foundation, accentuating its character of contemporary white cube, except for two annexes: a WUNDERKAMMER that compiles treated about color theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, materials of the animal and plant field that have given rise to pigments, textiles and glass, Hercuan remains or Greek and Roman masks that prove that chromatism was present in artistic creations from its earliest phases; And a room where the brief and immersive documentary is projected Coloramasby Aníbal Santaella, who condenses with a lot of success in just over five minutes the keys to color as a physical phenomenon, the contributions of his scholars in science and art and their social and political implications underlined by recent artists, such as Angelica Dass in his Pantone of skins.

You have to see it the autonomy of color in abstract art. March Foundation

They are part of this chromatic exaltation artists who, as we said, from different generations and conceptual and aesthetic starting points, have resorted to color as a structuring principle of their productions, released from the form and narrative, substantive and non -adjective: from the aforementioned Malevich to Rosa Brun, Teresa Lanceta, Olafur Eliasson, Felipe Pantone or Guillermo Mora, passing through Klein, Frank Stella, the aforementioned Cruz-Díez, Lucio Fontana or Mondrian. The usual suspects shake hands here, in a tour that does not separate them in chronological batch, with much less known authors at least in Spain, such as Polly Apfelbaum or Lubna Chowdhary.

Necessarily magnetic, this exhibition comes to celebrate the many paradoxes of color: it does not exist in itself, but thanks to the light, but nothing in the world could imagine without it; They reflected on their elusive essences from Aristotle to Wittgenstein; And although it has not ceased to be present in the future of art, from cave paintings to their digital developments, only abstraction released him from the line, the figure and the story to turn it into an axis of independent compositions.

With the first experiments within the framework of that current this collective begins, in which we expects and not gesture, because despite the fact that both in that WUNDERKAMMER as in Coloramas He realizes the philosophical, scientific, creative and linguistic disquisitions that have deepened in their non -being, in their combinations, their psychological and practical applications or its social dimension, ultimately we have no other than recognize that the color must be seen, which consists of experience and not in words, or even in any materiality. And that when it becomes a center, classifications are resisting, it defies its decorative consideration and calls into question hierarchies.

From Malevich and Ivan Kliun to Mora or Brun, the exhibition transits through the chromatic experiments in the France of the twenties and thirty, of Stijl, the suprematism, the constructivism, the bauhaus or the expanded field painting, emphasizing that if the twentieth century submerged in the chromatic power, the exhibitions of contemporary art do not seem to have responded sufficient inquiries, taking the color many times as a subject but not affecting what I could, per se and without line as we point out, shape a museum assembly.

As Rudolf Arnheim pointed out half a century ago, without him there is nothing: Every visual aspect owes its existence to luminosity and color. The limits that determine the shape of the objects are derived from the ability of the eye to distinguish different luminosity and color areas. That is even valid for the lines that define the shape in the drawings, which are only visible when the ink differs in paper color.