chests 9 advent_annaKirkpatrick

exhibition ACCORDS INATTENDUS
Musée Rolin, Autun, France, November 2010

François Pupil text

22 December - Violet d’Egypte

The numinous floating world

"The paintings from 1947-48 were, in fact, ambiguous, showing Rothko feeling his way toward an expression that would directly, without the interference of specific shape, suggest the numinous floating world into which he stepped once his obstacles were left behind. He scraped and thinned his colours. Their edges bled. A form with most tenuous of edges could slide into another, while atmosphere from one moment to the next could be weighted or lightened.” About Rothko, Dore Ashton, p105

19 December - Chinese orange & saffron

Colours like bombs

Maurice Denis’s remark about the Fauves’ « anarchy” was not unjustified. Derain placed his colours like bombs. “Our colours were turning into sticks of dynamite,” he said later to George Duthuit. “They were primed to discharge light.”

Matisse, Schneider p215

13 December - Silver

Colour chords and orchestration

“The different shades of colour combine like musical chords into a harmonic whole, in which the mood communicated by the colours is analogous to that of major and minor keys.The rich orchestration of the colour tones appears as a unified whole, even though the eye can still detect individual melodic phrases and differentiated structural rhythms.”

Paul Klee Painting Music, Hajo Düchting, p 57

30 November - White

Mystery

Louise Bourgeois describes one of her untitled drawings of the 1960’s: “I think mystery is more interesting than explanation, so let’s leave this a mystery.”

Louise Bourgeois, Drawings and Observations, p123

Ned Rifkin: The title, Why and What (Yellow), is very provocative—you’ve already talked about yellow being a colour you associate with madness. “Why” and “What”—together they become almost desperate. And the relative activity—almost nervous collision, offset intersections, and things that occur in this painting. What about it all?
Scully: …with Why and What (Yellow), everything’s fractured. It’s as if that painting fell off the back of a truck and broke, and I had to put it back together again, but I couldn’t remember how it went back together.