Los rojos / Los ensayos banales 5

When I see a mass of colour, I prick up my ears; I know that the success of any photograph I take, regardless of the motif on which I may be working, will depend on how I use this colour in the construction of the image.

The Reds, the trivial essay No.5, is about the use of colour – in this case, red – in the construction of images. Red plays a decisive role in all the images in the booklet; in some of them it even becomes the main theme.

The genealogy of this essay is obvious. The consideration of colour as an independent pictorial element, free from all descriptive servitude, is one of the keys of modern art. Painter and theoretician Robert Delaunay declared ‘Colour is both form and subject’. Colour theory was a subject included in the foundational programme of the Bauhaus, and had the same status as materials such as stone, wood or metal. Piet Mondrian painted his windmills red. Matisse’s The red studio is a seminal work of modern painting. Yves Klein propounds a colour (in this case, Klein Blue) as a work of art in itself. Anish Kapoor dispenses totally with supports and creates works with mere piles of pure pigment.’

Cristóbal Hara