I still remember the intensity of my first experience of Yves Klein Blue; the brightness, the depth, the vibrancy. It felt so intense, yet so calming. The colour was something I recognised, but somehow better. I yearned to know more.
Yearning is desire that doesn’t crave ownership, rather understanding. When I look into the depths of Yves Klein’s incandescent carpets of pigment, the intensity, the texture, the simplicity, makes me want to look, be close to it, understand what it means. It’s blue, but better. It’s both natural and unnatural. It’s a take on the recognisable. It is earthbound, but easy definition somehow dances out of reach.
Why is this colour making me feel so many things? It’s just a colour, surely. But for Klein, his blue was about something deeper. “Blue is the invisible becoming visible,” he said. “Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond the dimensions of which other colours partake.” His blue, patented subsequently as International Klein Blue (IKB), was the physical expression of his yearning for the mystical and the infinite. A line in a painting was a “prison grating”, it was only through total immersion in a colour that he found “total freedom”.
So we stare at his works in blue, and the one element somehow becomes a kaleidoscope. We oscillate between comfort and confusion. There are no corners or shapes to reassure us or turn us away, only the blue that keeps shifting before our eyes. As Klein uses his colour to make a bridge between the prosaic and the sublime, we follow him, yearning to know more.
The Everything at Once exhibition is at Store Studios, London until 10 December.
