Pigment on canvas with gold leaf, 50cm x 60cm
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Blue is colour. Blue is a condition. Sapphire blue in the Zohar is the ground stone holding everything together.
Blue is deep space, heart talk and infinity. Blue colours everything, it impregnates. Blue is a mental colour. Everything which is blue is also transparent, transcendent- the sky, clouds, water and the night. Blue is a nocturnal colour. Since Romanticism blue is the colour of dreams. Goethe, Novalis, Mallarmé, Paul Eluard, Gaston Bachelard and Elsa Lasker-Schüler all sing and weave poetry around blue: this AZUR.
The absence of an image in these blue paintings makes all images possible. Absence is the sensibility and reinvention of the present and presence. This is the deep space which carries everything out of nothing. In the beginning there is the image, the imagination, the wish for expression. Deep space is like diving into the depths of music, language, dance, feelings, imagination and the infinity of the universe. This nothingness becomes the vector of all possibilities. Blue is a force and a strength.
Blue is empathy, melancholy, tears, love and the sea. Blue is cool and it is distance. Blue is the suprasensual and purity. Maria’s robe in the paintings of Titian, Raphael and Botticelli is blue, - as if she were carrying the sky within herself. It is the immersion into God’s clothes in a natural and everyday form. Blue is also the flower Delphinium from the African Highlands or the blue of the Iris. Blue promises the golden age. It is the age old dream of paradise dreamt a new. Matisse’s dreams of paradise are in blue.
Paintings in the absence of an image have an immaterial fullness. Being and becoming fills the void, the reality of a dream lived in everyday life. Blue is a movement towards black. (Gaston Bachelard) This wondersome blue with its movement towards abstraction can already be found in oriental arabesques, in paintings by Giotto, Ingres, Turner, Rothko and Ives Klein.
Blue is a cosmogony. A vitality permeating the universe as the sun, moon and the stars. Blue is also Lapis Lazuli, the stone of wisdom. Both materiality and immateriality are contained in the blue paintings. ‘Life is an upward soaring movement and the highest form of paintings would be that the word blue would suffice in order to see blue. This way art would be omnipresent and freed of its materiality.’ (Yves Klein)
Blue shines like the sky, like the night, like a symphony and it throws the world into rapture. Blue is the majestic cloak of Maria, Queen of the heavens and it is Eve’s earthly costume in Matisse’s paintings. The nakedness of these blue figures is the condition of paradise for humanity.
Blue is eternity, deepest colour next to black. The gaze can sink into these paintings without finding an obstacle: infinity. Blue is liquidity and transparency, - sky, water, air, diamond or the black and blue head of clouds as in Modigliani’s portrait of a jewess. Blue encircles the great indefinable space, what touches the soul and what is touched by it.
'Blue creates that indefinable sensibility which permeates everything touchable, it almost scents of it.'
(Yves Klein)
