David Batchelor’s work is typically
concerned with our responses to colour incorporated from the vibrant hues and
lights of the city. Today we are entrenched
by technology, resulting in being surrounded by grey plastic slabs to read on
and tablets that give you a headache rather than dissolve one. Corporations
guard themselves from colour with waves of grey, with the monochrome coming to “die
as corporate decoration.”(Batchelor)
Informed by the history of abstract
art and an ambivalent relationship with consumerism, Batchelor’s monochromes
are a seized moment in time. Capturing such moments where advertisements are dozing
in a brief whitewash waiting to be re-awakened with a new ad, Batchelor
captures these readymade blanks that
detach themselves from their surroundings and apprehends them to create
intriguing gestures.
The early
monochromes were a response to a lecture given by Jeff Wall at the Slade on the
work of On Kawara. Although found, the monochromes are inherently complex, a
void of muted tones of one hue, whitewashed with intrigue and history that
question the aesthetic meaning of colour.
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On
Kawara (2000) MARCH 5,
2000 New York, [Liquitex
on canvas], 25.4 x 34.3 cm (Image (C) Zwirner and Wirth)
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Batchelor
suggests that “colour for conceptual art, is like kryptonite for superman”. Colour
is intimidating and with its close associations with decoration and frivolity it
isn’t always a mechanism for communicating profound ideas that could become
lost and isolated in portentous pigments. However, by being freed from line and
form, colour is often a distilled presence in the background of our everyday
lives.
Many of
Batchelor’s ready-made monochromes
are white, although Batchelor captured many primary coloured monochromes there
is a stronger engagement with the transience of the white. There is a sense
that the white is about to be eclipsed by a fresh pigment, that it is only ever
a non-colour or achromatic colour. Nonetheless it seems that the white isn’t
just covered with colour, it is reduced to have its inherent colour extracted
in order to permeate urban environments with objects of desire.
The found monochromes
are an absence trapped in an absurd presence an interval between states of
being awaiting to be regenerated from the invisible and degenerated into the
visible. They are a brief façade that when taken out of context and out of
colour, become beautiful moments of serendipity in the city.
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David
Batchelor, (2004), Stratford, London 10.03.04 2, [Photograph, 35mm film].
(Photo, courtesy
the artist and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London)
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