Page 49 of LUX.6 by Foscarini

094 arte_art who is afraid of the spectrum ellsworth kelly and color by luca massimo barbero color in art has a thousand origins and an equal number of legends or symbolic meanings in painting it has also been a poetic slave to the representation of an object a subject or a landscape that must appear as close to reality as possible because look at those colors they look real however a veritable scientific accident had a profound influence on many artists throughout the centuries light is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refractive rays with these words in 1655 in the midst of a century replete with discoveries isaac newton provided an explanation of optical perception and light refraction and to this distinguished company one might add rené descartes who as early as 1637 published an essay boasting one of the most memorable titles dedicated to light the origin of the rainbow this is the short and incomplete process that a young american soldier come to france only ten days after d-day jots down in a notebook hoping to visit the museums in paris obviously under lock and key in the raging final moments of this dramatic conflict for ellsworth kelly an american from the state of new york twenty-one years old at the time the obsession for the great french art and history museums would last through the years surpassed only by his love for color and for the study of combinations of the chromatic key in newton s spectrum and its seven parts red orange yellow green blue indigo violet but let s try to proceed in an orderly fashion to trace the development of a man who is perhaps not very familiar to the italian public but is internationally considered to be one of america s greatest and most original artists indissolubly bound to pure color to the canvas as a physical field of perception first of all while the scandal of action painting raged through the united states during the second half of the forties with the irascibles led by jackson pollock and the substance of painting displayed increasingly quirky and tormented forms and quantities on the canvases young kelly literally fled back to france no longer as a special trooper but as an omnivorous visitor of museums from the antiquities of the louvre to islamic art from the museum of cluny to the museum of natural history his most cherished dream became to succeed in representing and uniting the sublime richness of architectural lines with the cold but sumptuous scientific nature of colors of the spectrum understood through the poetics of newton or goethe and onwards to the romantic otto runge color seemed to be the password and rather paradoxically his often three-dimensional works represented austere windows rationalist elevations and for the most part they were white in 1951 following a three-year maturing process spurred by rationalism and his friendship with jean arp or his contact with matisse as well as his friendship with john cage who was living in europe at the time kelly began his series of `large paintings entitled spectrum syncopated pieces of color irregular and rhythmic textures that created labyrinths as well as possible and unlikely visions from above nocturnal cities and crazy kaleidoscopes that anticipated optical art by at least ten years the mystery began to take shape from that moment on kelly moved beyond the rainbow it took new shapes the color acquired a distinct and almost physical weight it became named it was distributed through the space of composition as if it had weight and it was with this weight of color or better yet through this weight that kelly rationally constructed the painting colors for a large wall in 1951 sixty-four panels combined in an apparently casual way building walls of color by means of monochrome canvases became his signature at a time when gestural painting was spreading rapidly kelly s works displayed a compositional severity that was absolutely original for the period the offspring of a rationalist tradition they were extremely modern they erected solemn and poetically 095 0range red relief solomon r guggenheim museum new york 1959

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