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Lot Essay
This work is recorded in the Yves Klein Archives under no. M100.
"Klein's monochromes pull the viewer inwards into the space of color, summoning him or her to contemplate their surfaces, through a spell-binding confection and coagulation of pigment in factures that resemble serene swirls, gentle ripples, thick accretions, and severe seismic waves. He describes this state of perceptual attention as 'pure phenomonology,' a complete self-awareness of one's embodied state, or the 'essential, pure climate of the flesh.' While color functioned as a pictorial-sensorial phenomenon of absolute material unity, Klein also saw it as a living presence that extended beyond the limits of the canvas. In his formulation, the 'unity of single color' came to represent a 'world without dimension,' a spatial infinity where 'pure sensibility' reigns supreme. The more color becomes specialized or 'pure,' reduced to its most absolute form and referring only to itself, the more it overcomes its own material boundaries and disperses in space. As it directs itself more resolutely to its material integrity, color enters the register of the 'sensible,' the moment-to-moment sensation of the living and the 'spiritual,' a perception of life apart from secularized culture.
In the material purity of color, then, Klein promises the spectator of his monochromes a condensed, embodied moment of everyday life experiences in its most unalienated form and unbound feeling of total assimilation with the vastness of a sacred universe. Through a communion with the monochrome, the spectator begins to feel the limits of his or her own body as as unfolding spatial experience, opening the gates to the conquest of real space. 'Man,' he prophesizes, 'will be able to conquer space ... only after having realized the impregnation of space by his own sensibility'" (N. Banai, "From the Myth of Objecthood to the Order of Space: Yves Klein's Adventures in The Void", in Yves Klein, exh. cat., Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, 2004, pp. 16-17).
"Klein's monochromes pull the viewer inwards into the space of color, summoning him or her to contemplate their surfaces, through a spell-binding confection and coagulation of pigment in factures that resemble serene swirls, gentle ripples, thick accretions, and severe seismic waves. He describes this state of perceptual attention as 'pure phenomonology,' a complete self-awareness of one's embodied state, or the 'essential, pure climate of the flesh.' While color functioned as a pictorial-sensorial phenomenon of absolute material unity, Klein also saw it as a living presence that extended beyond the limits of the canvas. In his formulation, the 'unity of single color' came to represent a 'world without dimension,' a spatial infinity where 'pure sensibility' reigns supreme. The more color becomes specialized or 'pure,' reduced to its most absolute form and referring only to itself, the more it overcomes its own material boundaries and disperses in space. As it directs itself more resolutely to its material integrity, color enters the register of the 'sensible,' the moment-to-moment sensation of the living and the 'spiritual,' a perception of life apart from secularized culture.
In the material purity of color, then, Klein promises the spectator of his monochromes a condensed, embodied moment of everyday life experiences in its most unalienated form and unbound feeling of total assimilation with the vastness of a sacred universe. Through a communion with the monochrome, the spectator begins to feel the limits of his or her own body as as unfolding spatial experience, opening the gates to the conquest of real space. 'Man,' he prophesizes, 'will be able to conquer space ... only after having realized the impregnation of space by his own sensibility'" (N. Banai, "From the Myth of Objecthood to the Order of Space: Yves Klein's Adventures in The Void", in Yves Klein, exh. cat., Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, 2004, pp. 16-17).