Couleur…dans l’art contemporain — Grey Area Multiples — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 1 → July 7, 2012

Grey Area Multiples presents a new show of affordable editions bringing together several works that play with colour. Needless to say, the show is indeed a colourful one. Some works take colour as a conceptual starting point; others just play joyfully with the bright stuff.

Ryan Boatright is clearly fascinated with the process of using colour. His work pursues, through a series of editions, the way in which colour is handled as a science. The generic colour reference cards that photographers use to get a correct colour balance are probably one of the most photographed objects on the planet and yet we very rarely see them as they never appear in final consumer images. Boatright uses this standard collection of coloured squares as a structure for analyzing and outputting his own family photos. Each fondly remembered moment is reduced to a collection of 24 monochrome squares, every key moment in his life becoming nothing more than a colour reference.

Richard Galpin takes colour on in a very different way. He starts with a photograph of glitzy modern advertising and then goes about finding ways of organising and hiding certain areas of this image. A white vinyl mask sits on top of the image bringing our attention to the areas of colour in the photo. In some senses it flattens the space in the image making us more aware of the naturally existing colour composition and in another sense it adds complexity and depth to a seemingly simple photo.

Katie Goodwin maintains her fascination with film, by investigating the pioneering use of colour in one of the first Technicolor films. In this series her work appropriates the original film leader from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The film starts with the drab real world in black and white and suddenly converts to colour as Dorothy finds herself in the land of Oz. Goodwin’s work celebrates that moment in cinematic history.