I learned that even though the vibration of a given color is the same, its resonance in each person is different. So I searched, in colors, for the truth. And I found it.
Goodÿ - Gilles EUGENE (May 2022)
Apart from material and texture, colors are also time with several levels of time in my approach. «Colors-time » are first of all one of the results of the use of « Colors-substances ». Indeed, these colors also each have their own drying time, their elasticity, their own transparency. With equal thickness and equal texture, it takes me longer to stretch a layer of dark blue than a layer of white, just as it also takes me a different amount of force to do it. I have never measured this, but I feel it, I experience it in my touch and my muscles. This level of « Colors-time », drying, is also a question of vibration, wavelength and light. But all this, I have never taken the time to measure it other than by my senses, by vibration, by resonance. From that time, I learned speed. A speed of execution, since working with water-based paints and everything is already constructed in my interiority… Today the essence of the colors merges with the essence of my thoughts, I am in permanent resonance with the colors at my disposal. I know what I have in the studio and if, in the essence of the works that are in me, there are missing colors in the studio, I do not make that work. However, this resonance allows me to create spontaneous pictorial expressions that resonate at a given moment, regardless of the colors I have available: these are performances.. Indeed, in these moments of pure improvisation, the atmosphere creates a dynamic in me and this dynamic immediately resonates with what I have available because I know what I have available. I even set myself challenges by sometimes deciding to work with a limited number of colors. I learned from these moments to obtain a « say » colors, whatever colors are available, in relation to a subject (because the mood becomes the subject). These moments are very important in my practice, because they taught me how to get what I wanted from the « Colors-time », to give them the existence that suits me. We have learned to respect each other in our freedoms and our constraints.
Color is time because it must also resist life. By its existence as a pictorial work on this stretched canvas, it is subject to hazards. I cannot control the future of the work once sold. How will it be exposed to light, wind, sun? I cannot control it. But, I can control to a certain extent, the durability of this color over time. This durability over time is also one of the expressions of « Colors-substances ». Colors, which are subject to visible hazards and alterations by the elements, are therefore also a time of existence. Just as we are born, and we die.
However, it is said that the work will survive us, yes, but how?
THE « Colors-time » then require restoration, maintenance, preservation, attention, caution, and protection. Experience and science dictate what types of colors to use, but when I spread color by stretching its molecules to the limit of bursting, I also change its time...
I learned about color time, exposing it to natural and technical constraints.I arranged the colors on scraps of canvas, leaving them lying in the sun, in the rain, lying on the earth floor of my early studio. I arranged other color experiments on canvases to be painted, in the oven preheated to different temperatures, different times. With different textures, different thicknesses and different drying times between layers. I went so far as to note down in a notebook every detail of these experiments… (Notebook that I never used and of which I have also lost all trace), simply because I was in resonance with the colors. I memorized even the sensations of my movements in relation to the colors.
Colors are also the time of history. The time of what I tell, of what I say, that I make feel beyond the visible color. I am constantly looking for that je ne sais quoi that will make the viewer's interior vibrate. It is agreed that everyone sees what they want. But, for my part, I think with another subtlety that everyone sees what they can. As we said at the beginning, our senses are educated. We describe our feelings with words that resonate with what we have acquired as knowledge over time.
Colors have taught me so much about time. But one of the things I'm going to tell you here is that each color vibrates within us as we give it time. Especially in so-called abstract or contemporary figurative works.
In my practice, colors today become tools to reveal to the viewer what is inside them. When I am with someone looking at a painting, I like to take them to go beyond what they describe with words like « it looks like this or that », « I see this or that ». I often say this: « I'm sure I put what you see, but I'm sure you don't see everything I put there. ». And, with each description that the person makes, I get them to talk to me about the feeling they have behind this description. I learned with the colors of time that often we talk about the same thing while describing it each with our words, and often we think we are talking about something other than the other when we are talking about the same thing.I learned that even though the vibration of a given color is the same, its resonance in each person is different. So I searched the colors for the truth. And I found it.
I am speaking of the truth and not of the perceptions we have of it. Because the interpretations we make of colors do not change the colored surface in any way. We could change its meaning and arrange it in all possible planes, this will not change the essence of the work born from these colors, but only its existence in the world, in relation to its environment of which we are a part. Colors are time within time, this time, an invariable word, but which is written with an s… colors are time, but not only that… colors are also spaces: « Colors-Spaces » ...
Goodÿ - Gilles EUGENE, Artist author. Excerpt from the meeting/debate on color harmony, the CFC theme for the International Color Days, May 21, 2022
