About colour

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 As an intellectual vibration smack dab in the middle of the spectrum

 Green can be a problem
That’s because there’s so many different greens inside of Green and 

 each one has a different IQ [1]
                                                             -Ken Nordine, Green (1966)

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What does colour do? This question has haunted me the last couple of years. I should have an answer. But I don’t.
   At my side job in a retail store, I sell paint to private consumers. Colour and paint for home projects; to repair and repaint furniture and walls. I am used to talk to customers about different paint, colors and their properties depending on their needs. How colours affect each other and how different lights change the colour. I solve their problems, like a superhero, really!
   Today at work a costumer asked me ”why does this two colours work so well together?” She showed me two sample sheets from Beckers design colours. It was ”Ängsull 597 (NCS 1103-y20r)” and ”Bergsklippa 531 (NSC 2204-y21r)”. Her question took me by surprise and said that I didn’t know how to answer. I looked at the NCS-code and released that it was basically the same colour but with different values. We ended the conversation talking about colour being a sublime transcendental essence that want to tell us something. Something intelligent with integrity that we, as humans, are too dumb to fully understand. My colleague, who overheard this conversation scratched his head in confusion. 

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    The finished paintings should seek to convey something to the viewer that is not entirely translatable through language or reason. A drama, but not a story. It’s the drama of colors, spaces, gestures, shapes, the textures of paint and the brushstrokes on the surface that intrigue me. The drama of stretching and bending one image during the process to find paintings that I could never imagine when I got the initial idea of making a painting.
   My painting Purple outline (in landscape), I see two blocks of color (caput mortuum and king’s blue) that resemble a landscape; there is a purple outline that encapsulates bodies of forms, color, and gestures. They are having and conversation, and I am not invited.

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Mathias Höglund, May, 2022

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[1]  The Nordine Group (1966). Green [Inspelad av Ken Nordine]. Från Colors [Album]. ASPHODEL 0954.