what is blue
The most precious color in art, for centuries.
Because?
It was very expensive.
Was it hard to get?
From aluminosilicate, sulfur atoms three by three, in an atomic tension that absorbs all colors... except blue.
When it repels blue, we see it, right?
Yes. It was made of lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone with lazurite, the sapphire of the Bible.
Where was this stone?
In Afghanistan: it came through Persia, they called it ultramarine blue. It had been used as a pigment since the 6th century, and in the 15th century its powder was refined into a pure, brilliant blue.
For Renaissance painters?
More expensive than gold, this blue was used to paint the mantle of the Virgin on the altarpieces.
How long was it like that?
Until it was produced synthetically in the 19th century. As a child I saw Yves Klein's blue Venus one day in the Berardo Collection, and that blue shocked me.
what blue is it
Blau Klein: Vibrant and velvety in texture, it was created by Yves Klein in the mid-20th century, with binder and pigment. What a blue painting of powerful light!
You study the materials of art.
Because my mom played makeup on me.
Did that mark her?
I sensed the power of beauty: a combed hair or a line of an eye on a pharaoh...
He could have dedicated himself to art.
But a teacher showed me the periodic table of the elements: the world was ordered, how beautiful! A criterion of truth.
Why do we find something beautiful?
mystery The formula E=mc2 is beautiful and this points to a truth.
What was the first thing we painted?
The negative of a hand, spraying soot and ocher on the wall of a cave... about 65,000 years ago.
And some bison too...
The drive to leave a mark. According to Picasso, all art after that was decadence.
A scientist, what does she see in art?
Who chooses materials for their symbolism. Art and science always go together.
A very symbolic material is gold...
Strange and unchanging. And so ductile that with only 130 grams of gold, ten thousand sheets of gold bread of 8 x 8 centimeters can be manufactured. I understand that the alchemists intended to synthesize gold. And meanwhile they were discovering things.
Materials us?
And colors, like the varieties of white: lead white, titanium white, zinc white, from China, from Spain, the best for whitening...
And what about the color black?
The blackest black in the universe is Vantablack.
Vantablack?
It is a synthetic material made from carbon nanotubes, which absorbs 99.99% of light!
It will look absolutely black, then.
Seeing a block of Vantablack on a silver paper creates the mirage of seeing a deep hole, a deep black well.
Where does the absorbed light go?
It is retained in the nanotubes and dissipates as heat.
Now help me look at the vivid colors of Piet Mondrian's paintings...
His art overcomes forms, pierces the veil of appearances to see giant pixels of color: red, blue, yellow, black.
Checkered... And the sculptors, what?
I fell in love with Chillida for the use of materials, such as concrete in his Elogi de l'horizó, in front of the sea in Gijón.
I know it, I was inside that monumental sculpture.
Remember its size, the circular shape, which rises from the ground to the sky, and you inside: everything appeals to the horizon and that color, that rusting concrete, the color of the earth... At the same time sculpture, building, shelter ... Master
What other artist charms him?
The Russian Kazimir Malevich, who with the minimum formally achieves the maximum emotionally: in his controversial painting White on White, he paints a rolling white square, tilted, on a white background.
White on white?
Yes, and it looks monochromatic, and no! If you approach it, you see that the rotating square is a warmer white than the white background.
Do museums lift our spirits?
And also walk around your neighborhood with a clean look, look at it as if you had never seen it before. I love to induce this feeling of strangeness and enjoy it. It's a way of living.
This is what Guy Debord's situationists did, I think...
It is true, they walked knowing that the terrain determines the drift of the walk itself: psychogeography is very real!
