BLUE
BLUE
Elisabeth Vary, Geoff Thornley, Günter Umberg, Erin Lawlor, Winston Roeth, Gary McMillian, Leigh Martin, Tomislav Nikolic
10 Putiki Street
Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand
“I want to die with my blue jeans on” Andy Warhol.
Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not... All colours arouse specific associative ideas... while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. Yves Klein.
Surely too much has been written about the blues to add meaningfully to it. If ever there was a colour that enjoys a parallel life as an analogy for an emotional state, it is blue and yet the lyrics and riffs just keep on coming, even if Yves Klein hadn't heard them.
From Johnny Cash to Jim Morrison, Muddy Waters to New Order, Tom Waits to Crystal Gayle “blue” folds introspection and melancholy inside a blanket of ethereal.
The works in this exhibition don’t seek to leverage the same sentimental hook as the lyrics and riffs; rather they approach blue I suspect because of its mysterious body. Blue has the capacity to be deep and to be pale, to be heavy and to be light and yet it always remains blue. It doesn’t rescind its name and character like red who becomes pink and crimson, it doesn’t camouflage itself like green and become British Racing or olive.
Andrew Jensen, November 2017