Colour in the interval

Abstract

This paper deals with the temporal dimension of the interaction of colour and light in contemporary art, and more specifically with the intervallary nature of the colour-light event. Based on the author’s light installations, it examines the question of monochromatic colour and of the interaction of colours in painting as compared with the contemporary use of sequences of coloured light. It shows how the author’s installations avoid both unchanging and rapidly changing light in order to focus on interval-enhancing slowness as a factor of the emergence of colour. The paper first describes the 1950s and 1960s breakthroughs of colour-light as both distinct from and similar to the painters’ use of pigment. Then it focuses on the questions raised by light works that include temporal evolutions and it insists on the spatial and temporal dimensions of coluor juxtaposition. Based on this notion of juxtaposition, it then develops the author’s theory and practice of the interval. It describes how her recent installations focused on duration and slowness so as to expand the experience of the interval, thus provoking sensorial and emotional experiences associated with the intervallary colour-light event.