COLOR

Color, Memory, and Democracy

I grew up during Argentina's last military dictatorship. As a child, before I could understand what was happening politically, I experienced those years through the texture of everyday life. In my memory, they are gray, formal, and chromatically impoverished.

The return of democracy in 1983 felt like an explosion of color. Among my memories of that transformation are Benetton's brightly colored clothing and advertising. Their extraordinary chromatic intensity seemed radically different from the formality I associated with the preceding years.

I do not mean that Argentina under the dictatorship was literally devoid of color, or that democracy necessarily brought more colorful clothes. I am describing the way those years survive in my memory.

There is something interesting about the fact that this experience of chromatic freedom was associated with a commercial brand. Market society has not simply restricted color. Industrial production and commercial competition have also made possible, and sometimes actively promoted, extraordinary chromatic diversity.

Yet these moments of exuberance coexist with what appears to me to be a much broader tendency toward standardization. The overwhelming predominance of neutral-colored automobiles, the increasingly uniform palettes of domestic interiors, and the conventions governing acceptable personal appearance suggest that the expansion of chromatic possibilities has not translated into a corresponding expansion of the colors we ordinarily choose—or feel free—to use.

That contradiction has become central to my interest in color.

Chromatic Abundance and Social Restriction

We live in a world with an extraordinary capacity to produce color. Industrial chemistry has made available an enormous variety of pigments, dyes, paints, inks, and colored materials. Colors that were once rare, prohibitively expensive, or technologically impossible can now be manufactured on a massive scale and purchased at relatively modest prices.

Yet much of the world we inhabit is surprisingly restrained in its use of color.

Look at cars. Despite the enormous range of colors manufacturers could produce, our streets are dominated by white, black, gray, and silver vehicles. Even the choice of a car's color can be accompanied by warnings about its supposed economic consequences. People are told that red cars attract more speeding tickets or cost more to insure. The insurance claim is largely a myth, and the evidence concerning traffic enforcement is inconclusive. Yet the persistence of these beliefs is revealing. Aesthetic choices can become associated with financial risks, whether those risks are real, exaggerated, or entirely imagined.

Houses and apartments frequently reproduce a narrow palette of whites, beiges, grays, and muted tones. Interior decoration increasingly seems to aspire to a standardized ideal of tasteful neutrality, something resembling the aesthetic promoted through countless Airbnb listings. Buildings and entire urban landscapes often display a similarly restricted chromatic range.

Clothing offers considerably more variety, but here too color is subject to conventions. Wearing intensely saturated colors can invite judgments about personality, taste, gender, age, or social status. We can dye our hair practically any color imaginable, yet someone who chooses bright blue or green hair may face professional consequences that someone with a conventional hair color would never encounter.

These restrictions are not simply technological. Nor are they merely matters of individual taste.

The predominance of a relatively narrow range of colors across so many areas of contemporary life is difficult to understand as merely the sum of independent individual preferences. It suggests something resembling what Émile Durkheim called a social fact: a pattern of thinking and acting that exists beyond particular individuals and exerts pressure upon them.

Some of the economic considerations involved are relatively easy to identify. Automobile manufacturers anticipate consumer demand; property owners consider resale values; employers establish standards of professional appearance that can affect a person's ability to earn a living. In other cases, the connections are much less apparent. Preferences and judgments of taste have their own histories, and the social processes through which they develop may involve numerous institutions, experiences, and layers of mediation.

I am interested in investigating how these different processes relate to one another, and particularly how the extraordinary expansion of our material capacity to produce color has coexisted with persistent conventions restricting its use. I suspect that the economic organization of modern society is important to understanding this contradiction, but its significance cannot be established simply by identifying an economic interest behind every aesthetic judgment.

The Instrumentalization of Color

The restriction of color is not the only aspect of contemporary chromatic life that interests me. The market also promotes intense color, sometimes with results that I find aesthetically unpleasant.

What concerns me is the instrumentalization of color: its use primarily as a means to achieve objectives that have little to do with the aesthetic qualities of the resulting objects or environments. Color becomes a tool for attracting attention, identifying consumers, distinguishing products, or increasing sales. Its success is measured less by what it contributes aesthetically than by how effectively it serves these purposes.

My childhood fascination with Benetton provides an interesting example. Its brightly colored clothing and advertising seemed to offer a striking alternative to the formality I associated with earlier years. Yet Benetton's use of color was also central to its commercial identity. Its chromatic exuberance helped distinguish its products within a particular segment of the clothing market, associated especially with youthful, informal attire.

There is a paradox here. The existence of a market for brightly colored casual clothing does not necessarily challenge the conventions that make such clothing inappropriate in other circumstances. It may even reinforce them. The colorful sweater belongs to one category of consumer, while the restrained business suit belongs to another. Color becomes a way of distinguishing social identities and appropriate occasions rather than simply expanding the range of aesthetic possibilities available to everyone.

This does not mean that the people designing or wearing these clothes lack genuine aesthetic interests. Nor does it invalidate the pleasure I experienced in encountering them. It means that the commercial promotion of chromatic diversity can coexist with the reproduction of boundaries governing where that diversity is considered acceptable.

Advertising offers another example, and one that I often find considerably less appealing.

Our cities are filled with advertisements that use intense colors instrumentally, to attract attention. Some are visually inventive, but others strike me as positively ugly. Their colors may be selected primarily for their capacity to distinguish a product, communicate a brand identity, or capture the attention of potential consumers.

What often seems absent is any serious consideration of how these images relate to the environments in which they appear. A billboard may be effective as advertising while being entirely indifferent to the colors of the surrounding buildings, streets, vegetation, or other elements of the urban landscape.

The result can be a peculiar combination of chromatic deprivation and chromatic excess. Buildings and public spaces may conform to restrained palettes, while advertisements introduce aggressive concentrations of color whose purpose is not to enrich the shared environment but to compete for attention.

The problem is not that advertisements are colorful. Nor is it that commercial images cannot possess aesthetic value. It is that their place within the visual environment is organized according to priorities that do not necessarily include the aesthetic quality of that environment as a whole.

Of course, any form of mass production presents difficulties for aesthetic integration. Objects designed for circulation across different places cannot always be tailored to their surroundings. But this does not mean that the visual character of our shared environments must be subordinated to the commercial objectives of whoever can purchase advertising space.

I can imagine a society in which chromatic diversity is far more widely embraced, while the relationship between colors, objects, buildings, and public spaces receives much greater consideration.

Such a society would not necessarily be more colorful everywhere. It might contain areas of considerable restraint and others of extraordinary chromatic intensity. What would differ is the process through which those choices are made, and the importance assigned to their aesthetic consequences.

My interest is therefore not in maximizing the quantity of color in the world. It is in expanding our chromatic possibilities while questioning the social arrangements that determine where, how, and for what purposes color is used.

The Uses and Limits of Color

None of this means that every possible color is equally appropriate in every situation, or that a more colorful world would necessarily be a better one. There are practical, physiological, and aesthetic reasons to limit chromatic intensity in particular contexts. Dark surfaces exposed to sunlight can absorb more heat. A room with intensely saturated red walls might not be a particularly pleasant environment in which to spend several hours every day. Chromatic restraint can also be an entirely legitimate aesthetic preference.

Even in a society without widespread prejudices against intense color, some people would undoubtedly prefer muted tones. I have no objection to that. What interests me is not the existence of such preferences, but their remarkable convergence across so many areas of contemporary life.

A society that embraced a broader chromatic range would still have reasons to limit particular colors in particular circumstances. The question is whether the restrictions we encounter today can be explained by those practical considerations and individual preferences alone. I suspect they cannot.

What interests me is not a world in which everything is brightly colored, but one in which the range of colors people feel free to choose is closer to the range of colors they are actually capable of producing.

A History of Chromatic Possibilities

The history of color is not the history of humanity gradually discovering how to escape a colorless world. Many ancient societies produced objects, textiles, buildings, and images of extraordinary chromatic intensity. But producing color was often difficult, expensive, and dependent on particular materials, technologies, and networks of exchange. Access to it was unevenly distributed.

The ancient Egyptians, for example, manufactured a blue pigment from silica-rich materials and copper compounds, providing an alternative to costly lapis lazuli imported from distant regions of Asia. Egyptian blue demonstrates that sophisticated color technologies existed thousands of years ago, while the contrasting histories of these two blue materials reveal how differently colors could be produced, valued, and circulated.

In the Americas, Indigenous societies developed sophisticated traditions of dyeing and textile production long before European conquest. Their chromatic achievements were not dependent on European technologies.

During the expeditions that preceded the Spanish conquest of the Andes, Bartolomé Ruiz encountered an Indigenous trading raft off the Pacific coast of South America. An early Spanish account described finely worked textiles in scarlet, crimson, blue, yellow, and numerous other colors, alongside precious-metal objects and other merchandise.

The encounter revealed not only extraordinary textile production but also established networks of Indigenous maritime commerce. The range and quality of the goods contributed to Spanish perceptions of the wealth and sophistication of the societies they were approaching.

These examples remind us that chromatic abundance existed in many parts of the world long before modern industrialization. Nevertheless, the production of intense and durable colors frequently required considerable labor, specialized knowledge, expensive materials, or access to distant sources.

The relationship between color and social hierarchy was particularly visible in European clothing. Expensive dyes, richly colored textiles, and elaborate garments could distinguish privileged groups, while sumptuary regulations sometimes restricted what people of different ranks could wear. With the expansion of commerce and the increasing wealth of urban groups, access to costly clothing and colors changed, challenging established forms of social distinction.

Color was never simply a matter of aesthetic preference. Its production and distribution were deeply embedded in economic and social relations.

Color, Commerce, and Conquest

From the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, European overseas expansion and long-distance commerce were particularly attracted to commodities that concentrated substantial value in relatively little cargo space. Precious metals, spices, valuable dyestuffs, and certain highly desired consumables occupied prominent positions in these trading networks.

Colorants belonged to this group.

Cochineal from the Americas and indigo from India were valuable commodities whose prices could justify transportation across enormous distances. Europeans imported Indian indigo long before establishing colonial rule over the subcontinent, initially through established Asian and Mediterranean commercial networks and subsequently through direct maritime trade.

Brazilwood provides an interesting counterexample to the importance of compactness. Unlike cochineal or processed indigo, it was bulky and occupied considerable cargo space. Nevertheless, European demand for the red dye extracted from it made its exploitation and transatlantic transportation profitable. Color was valuable enough to justify the extraction and shipment of a cumbersome material.

The importance of color extended beyond pigments and dyestuffs themselves. Europeans also imported richly colored textiles from Asia, including Indian cottons and Chinese silks, whose value depended partly on sophisticated dyeing technologies.

Indian textile makers produced brilliant blues using indigo and reds using madder-related dyes, alongside yellows, greens, and purples. Chinese silk dyers achieved similarly rich palettes with materials such as safflower, sappanwood, indigo, and several yellow-producing plants. These colors were the result of highly developed technical traditions, often involving complex sequences of dyeing, mordanting, and other treatments.

Europeans did not invent these colors or the techniques used to produce them. They entered commercial networks connecting societies with long-established traditions of color production.

What interests me is the prominence of color within this history. Alongside precious metals, spices, and desirable consumables, substances used to produce color—and objects whose value depended partly on their coloration—helped sustain commercial networks connecting distant regions of the world.

These networks sometimes preceded European colonial domination and sometimes became inseparable from it. In the Americas, the production and extraction of valuable colorants became part of the economic history of conquest and colonial exploitation.

The desire for color was not a marginal aesthetic concern. It was economically consequential on a global scale.

The Colors of Antiquity and the Architecture of Restraint

The history of architecture offers another example of how our relationship to color has been shaped by historical circumstances.

For centuries, influential European architectural ideals were informed by an image of classical Greece and Rome dominated by white marble. Ancient buildings and sculptures that survived into later periods often appeared largely devoid of their original painted decoration. Their weathered surfaces helped establish whiteness as a sign of classical beauty, purity, and restraint.

Yet Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture frequently incorporated painted surfaces, colored materials, and elaborate polychrome decoration.

Much of that color disappeared through weathering, burial, cleaning, and the passage of time.

What later generations sometimes understood as the aesthetic intention of antiquity was partly the consequence of its deterioration.

The history is more complicated than a simple misunderstanding. Evidence of ancient polychromy was known, discussed, and sometimes contested. Nevertheless, the idealization of white classical forms became an influential element of European aesthetic culture, particularly within neoclassicism.

I find this fascinating because it reveals how standards of beauty that appear timeless can emerge from historically contingent circumstances, including the physical transformation of the objects that later generations take as models.

The relative chromatic restraint of much contemporary architecture cannot be explained by neoclassicism alone. Modernist aesthetics, building technologies, commercial development, property markets, and changing conventions of taste have also played important roles. Nor has architecture always been restrained: many traditions and movements have embraced intense color.

But the classical example illustrates a broader point. The colors we consider appropriate for buildings, interiors, clothing, or objects are not determined solely by what technology makes possible. They are shaped by histories that can become invisible precisely because their results come to appear natural.

The Industrial Expansion of Color

The development of synthetic dyes and pigments transformed the material conditions of color production.

The nineteenth-century expansion of industrial chemistry, including the development of synthetic organic dyes, opened possibilities for manufacturing colors that had previously depended on expensive natural materials, labor-intensive processes, or geographically restricted resources.

The subsequent development of synthetic pigments, modern binders, plastics, inks, and industrial paint technologies further expanded the range of colors available for artistic and everyday use.

This transformation did not invent intense color. Nor did it eliminate the differences between expensive and inexpensive materials, durable and fugitive colors, or colors available to different populations.

But it changed the scale on which colors could be produced, reproduced, distributed, and consumed.

Today I can purchase paints and markers in an enormous variety of hues, saturations, opacities, and formulations. I can compare several versions of what appears to be the same color, discover that they contain different pigments, and experiment with combinations that would have been difficult or impossible to produce in earlier periods.

The materials I use are products of this history.

They are not simply extensions of my imagination. Their existence depends on centuries of accumulated knowledge, industrial chemistry, manufacturing systems, commercial distribution, and the work of people whose names I may never know.

This dimension of my practice is explored more extensively in TECHNE.

Lightfastness and the Role of Time in My Artwork

Lightfastness is extremely important to me. I want the colors in my paintings to retain their intensity over time, and I devote considerable attention to understanding the permanence of the pigments and materials I use. This concern has led me to change some of my practices. Although I have used fluorescent paints extensively, I have increasingly experimented with producing effects resembling fluorescence through combinations of more lightfast colors. The results are not chemically equivalent to fluorescent pigments, but they can create a comparable impression of chromatic intensity. I discuss these experiments and the material differences involved in greater detail in TECHNE.

Yet I have not abandoned fluorescent paints or other materials known to fade or change with exposure to light. When I use them, I do so with an awareness of their impermanence. Their colors may gradually diminish, shift, or disappear, transforming the relationships within the composition. I do not necessarily regard these transformations as damage that invalidates the work. A painting is a material object existing in time, and its appearance need not remain identical to the moment of its completion. The changes produced by the instability of certain colors can themselves become meaningful aspects of the artwork.

There is a tension here that interests me: I can devote considerable effort to making some colors endure while deliberately accepting that others will not. Permanence and transformation are not mutually exclusive artistic commitments. They can coexist within the same practice, and potentially within the same painting.

Color in Chromagma

The contradiction between chromatic possibility and chromatic restraint is central to my interest in color.

I am attracted to intense saturation, unusual combinations, fluorescent pigments, and colors that might be considered excessive, artificial, childish, decorative, or vulgar. I am interested in what happens when I stop treating these associations as reasons to avoid them.

This does not mean that more color is always better, or that restraint is inherently undesirable. Nor do I believe that every convention should be violated simply because it exists.

Color has to work within the painting. It can establish relationships between forms, create tensions, produce depth or flatten space, direct attention, and generate unexpected effects. Sometimes a color that seems almost unbearable in isolation becomes indispensable in a particular composition.

There is also a dimension of pleasure in my relationship to color. I enjoy discovering pigments, comparing hues, experimenting with mixtures, and exploring materials whose possibilities I do not yet understand. The acquisition of new colors can itself become a source of anticipation and gratification, sometimes connected to patterns of compulsive consumption that I explore elsewhere in Chromagma, particularly in INVENTORY.

I do not want to explain every chromatic decision through psychology, technology, economics, or art history. These dimensions are important, but none of them determines what a painting must become.

Nor do I regard my use of intense color as something outside the economic system whose restrictions interest me. Quite the opposite: my freedom to experiment with an extraordinary range of colors depends on industrial production and commercial distribution.

The extraordinary expansion of our capacity to produce color has taken place within the same society in which powerful conventions continue to restrict its use. Understanding how these developments are related is one of the questions that interests me.

Chromagma is one place where I can explore that contradiction.

I can work with colors without first asking whether they belong in a respectable living room, a professional wardrobe, or a commercially desirable automobile. I can investigate combinations that established conventions might discourage, while still subjecting them to the demands of the work itself.

What interests me is not simply the liberation of color from restraint, but the historical and social conditions that make some colors desirable, others unacceptable, and an extraordinary range of chromatic possibilities simultaneously available and underused.

Color and the World Beyond Chromagma

More recently, color has acquired another personal significance.

An eating disorder and associated health problems increasingly confined me to my home, a situation intensified by the pandemic. Following a life-threatening medical crisis, I began a difficult process of recovery.

My world had again become gray.

But my attraction to color did not originate in these circumstances. It reaches back to childhood and has developed through my experiences, intellectual interests, historical investigations, and artistic experiments. Illness and recovery have added another dimension to that relationship; they do not explain it.

I began building Chromagma within an increasingly restricted world, experimenting with colors whose intensity sometimes seems almost excessive. Yet I do not want the world I create through painting to become a substitute for the world beyond my home.

My hope is concrete: to recover sufficiently to leave my house, reconnect with people, and explore the colors of the world again.

I want adventure and curiosity back. To borrow Star Trek, I want "to boldly go where no one has gone before."