Living Colour
Group Exhibition
6 September 2025
I prefer living in colour, David Hockney remarked. The assumption is that we have a choice we must use. Colours, like features, follow the changes of the emotions. Pablo Picasso’s realization is that the heart is bonded to colour, that wellness, when illuminated, reveals the language of colour. Not only visible, colour is also an emotional graph, a kind of sonar. For Marc Chagal, colour vibrates, like music. For Wassily Kandinsky, colour is the keyboard, the eyes … the harmonies, the soul … the piano with many strings.
Not all artists care for saturated colour. It possesses an emotional significance which Lucien Freud chose to avoid. Indeed, for centuries Western art has sought to avert saturation, the classical palette informed by burnished earth tones. Within this subtly modulated range Truth was claimed and Realismtransformed into a genre. However, in the 19thcentury there was an explosion of scientific experimentation which resulted in an explosion of psychedelic colour, a fact suppressed in the service of a dull order. Intense vermilion, greens and purples, were sold in pliable metal tubes, invented by the American painter John Goffe Rand in 1841, while the boom in synthetic dyes redefined fashion. William Turner and Vincent van Gogh’s love of chrome yellow is a fine example. That it was also called ‘yellow fever’ reveals the intense passion for saturated colour.
The revolution in colour anticipates Impressionism, Expressionism, and Abstraction. The world was no longer a window, life no longer tonally suppressed and appraised at a reasonable distance. The explosion of colour also meant the explosion of the psychological realm – our inner world. As Paul Gaugin recalls – Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent [Van Gogh] … When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colours, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion?
Living Colour conveys an enduring passion that shaped the past two centuries. What we are looking at are the latter-day expressions of what Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century dubbed the painters of modern life. If saturated colour proved revolutionary, this is because it radically altered our view of the world and its meaning. Experimentations with colour in the mid-19th century onward, signaled the rise of interiority – the private life. The birth of the stream of consciousness in Modernist literature is indicative, as is the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis, the bold palette of Fauvism, or the psychically implosive use of vivid colour in German Expressionism. Despite the insistence on the monochromatic – a black and white graphic world – it is colour that best evokes human passion – our vulnerability, tenderness, longing, hope.
Living Colour signals the desire to understand the unsaid in Modern Life. Contra Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres who declared – better gray thangarishness – Graham Contemporary champions a vitalism for this dark age. The stratospheric return of Vladimir Tretchikoff – whose painting Lady from the Orient recently sold for a record breaking $1,970,992 / R35,190,000 – also signals a return of saturation. Against a discriminatory black and white world or one reduced to gradients of grey, against a world that is punitive and embittered or aggressively negatory, this show of colour is celebratory.
Whether the flower or the colour is the focus I do not know, Georgia O’Keeffe reflects. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the colour? The paintings on show by the New York based South African, Byron Fredericks, shares a deep kinship with O’Keeffe. In both, it is the colour-flooded figure that is the shaping force. Other painters remind us that there is no single way to express the impact of colour. Is it a kind of light, as Turner affirms? Is this the understanding that informs Lola Frost’s densely filigreed forests? Is it light too that shapes Gabrielle Raaff’s paintings, drenched in a quiet liquid luminosity. Contrarily, what of Mary Visser’s bold abstracts? They are not depictions of a binding impressionistic liquidity, but ruptures generated within solid yet vibratory masses of colour.
In this group show – Living Colour – it is the vibratory differences between artists that is the key. How one moves between worlds, what one absorbs. The effect of the show is photosynthetic. This chemical process that occurs in plants when they are exposed to sunlight is akin to the impact of colour on and in the human body. We become energized, cede all rational management of the world. Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet, says Paul Klee. Colour is a power that directly influences the soul, says Kandinsky. Colours express the main psychic functions of man, says the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Why, then, are we afraid of colour? As Vincent van Gogh predicted – the painter of the future is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before.
