Jefferson McCarthy Artist Response 2015
Yves Klein
Yves was a French Artist
who worked in the post-war era of European art. He was also a leader and
founder of Nouveau réalisme (new realism), a movement founded on the basis of a
"collective singularity" amongst artists. Yves focused primarily on
abstract painting, performance art, and installation art. He is generally
associated with his use of the color Ultramarine Blue.
The major motifs of
Klein's work are the infinite and the immaterial. There is a heavy focus on
presenting ideas of freedom through space, color, and movement. Klein resonated
with expression that was independent of objects. The abstract ideas he
communicates are often times accompanied by immediately recognizable themes,
like religion, or images meant to evoke nature. This reflects his desire to
create universal works that are open to interpretation.
The predominant feature
of Klein's work is color. Klein uses monochromes and large empty spaces of
color as a mean for presenting his ideas about boundlessness and the role of art
as a facilitator of freedom. In creating a mass of color without lines or
figures, the viewer can do whatever they want with it. He frequently used blue
as a representation of the cosmic energy surrounding the earth. The shade of
Blue he used was a pigment that he developed with a chemist, and subsequently
named International Klein Blue (IKB). He used other colors as well, most
notably, gold, and orange.
Another medium of
expression that Klein used was performance art. Anthropométries is a series of paintings created with IKB and
“live” brushes. A group of nude female models would cover their bodies in paint
and press themselves against a canvas, creating a flattened image of the
thighs, torso, and breasts. The idea came to Klein when he noticed the imprints
left on mats by judo wrestlers (Klein was a master Judo artist). He uses these
images of pure color to convey the essential mass of the universe. The sexual
images are not lascivious, but insightful. They stand for the “health that
brings humans into being”. (Klein). Some Feminists have criticized his process
on the basis that his conduction of the female model is a power dynamic.
Klein continued
working with the concepts in Anthropométries
to create his fire paintings. The Fire paintings were a series of images
created by pressing fire against paper with models wearing flame retardant
suits.
Klein’s
sculptural work also focused heavily on his cosmic blue pigment. One particular
series, Sponge Sculptures, is a
collection of different sponges died with the same blue pigment. Each sponge
represents the viewer after they have looked into the monochromes, and become
engulfed in sensibility.
I resonate with Klein’s use of color. Color is
the focus and subject of all his works, because he believed that color was a
force that encompassed the human experience. My work deals less with the cosmic
influence of color and more with the personal affects that color leaves behind.
