‘You have to do’: the chromatic victory of the Juan March Foundation

But also, as the British artist and theorist claimed David Batchelor In his book ‘Chromophobia’ (2001), he has been the subject of an important prejudice within Western culture: whether it is considered banal or decorative, which is associated with the feminine or sensual, the color has maintained a constant submission in favor of the line, and it would be only since the sixties of the last century when the consciousness of the equality between both elements -or even on the primary nature of the color in front of the color He began to gain positions.

This is the thesis that defends the exposure of the Juan March Foundation ‘You have to do with it. The autonomy of color in abstract art ‘, of which Batchellor himself is a collaborator (with a text in the catalog and a piece on exposure) and that brings together almost eighty works that cross the twentieth and twenty -first centuries: from the first experiments of European abstraction in the ten gesture, and that have important intellectual and formalist ingredients. They are not colored works, nor do they make their color a subject. They are the color done work Or, in other words, color is the axis of its own materialization.

Another story of abstract painting

The appointment can be interpreted as a history of European and North American contemporary abstract painting, with timely escapes to other latitudes, such as East and Latin America. And although it also opens to other disciplines (such as the ceramics of Richard Deacon, Teresa Lanceta’s textiles, Guillermo Mora’s sculptures, the facilities of Carlos Cruz-Díez, The photos of Wolfgang Tillmans or the stained glass windows Carlos Muñoz of Pablos), these productions always retain an undeniable imprint of the aesthetic formulations of the pictorial, converging in a common germ: the findings of the avant -garde of the beginning of the century, which the commissioners place in the immense figure of the Russian Kazimir Malevich and that are articulated from the full emancipation of the canons of the illusionist representation.

A small suprematic ‘gouache’ (a delicious ‘red square’, from 1915) is the beginning of a journey jalted by essential names, other questionable and all the absences that each one’s cultural memory wants to miss. Aware of the inevitably incomplete of a historical story of this size, the commissioners have played intermingling, in their disposition of the room, different names, dates and styles, while interwoven small but suggestive stories: among them, the insistence on the aforementioned chromophobic path in the art of the twentieth century, which also finds in Malevich its root of his best epigons in the colorless, acids, Piero Manzoni, where painting and picture cease to be synonyms.

Also, more subtle, other links and associations are established, such as the one that connects the dazzling ‘blue rain’ of Yves Klein With the last film of the filmmaker Derek Jarman, where that same color, which floods the screen, symbolizes a progressive blindness associated with HIV.

The exhibition is organized in three sections. The first revolves around the premise of the white cube, an essential element in the exhibition context of the twentieth century that offers a smooth and naked mural surface, allowing the modern work to be shown in all its splendor. Halfway to this orthodox assembly, a fascinating and motley appendix emerges as a chamber of wondersan exhibition typology of the Baroque.

In this space, books, documents and sources of the color theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meet, along with tables, diagrams, color letters and experimental artifacts. Sculptures and masks are also exhibited of Greek antiquity, fresco fragments, polychrome stained glass and medieval sculptural works, some accompanied by their contemporary reconstructions to show the original chromatism of these pieces.

In addition, this chamber includes elements such as Amazonian plumaria, color -producing minerals, natural pigments and dyes, dynamics of dyeing plants, textiles and glass -letters before and after being dyed -as well as a tour of the evolution towards synthetic pigments. The latter turned the color into an accessible and standardized consumption article, allowing artists to free themselves from the restrictions of the traditional workshop. A small space full of fascinating objects that, with great mastery, intertwines essential aspects to understand the deep philosophical, ideological and anthropological implications of color.

The third space is a digital installation, ‘coloramas’, devised by Aníbal Santaella And the commissioners, which is presented as an expansive chamber composed of nine screens and that, in short, demonstrates that the worst vices of the immersive exhibitions – the banalization and spectacularization of the contents – can be scammed to turn technology into an effective pedagogical tool.

‘You have to do with it. The autonomy of color in abstract art ‘

Collective Juan March Foundation. Madrid. C/ Castelló, 77. Commissioners: Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Zozaya Álvarez. Until June 8.

Thus, it reveals to a motionless spectator, in front of moving images, how the use of color has widened and transformed the artistic sensibility of our contemporaneity.