PARADISE FOUND: THE USE OF COLOUR IN BEN SLEDSENS’ WORK

Karen Van Godtsenhoven

Should your glance on mornings lovely Lift to drink the heaven’s blue Or when sun, veiled by sirocco, Royal red sinks out of view –Give to Nature praise and honour.

Blithe of heart and sound of eye, Knowing for the world of colour

Where its broad foundations lie.

J.W. von Goethe

from: Zahme Xenien VI

Anyone taking a bird’s-eye view of Belgian painting since 1830, from Spilliaert to Tuymans, will divine a predilection for fifty shades of North Sea grey. James Ensor had already lampooned this in 1900 with his text ‘The Fleming is no longer a colourist’, in which he fulminated against the Belgian painters who were slavishly following the impressionist palette from abroad.1 His statement came more than ten years after Vincent van Gogh’s famous words from 1888: “But the painter of the future is a colourist the like of which we have not yet seen.” (letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 4 May 1888)2

Ensor was of the view that, since Rubens (and Memling and Van der Weyden before him), no notable individual styles had been created in a Flanders where colour usage largely followed the tone set by overseas developments, resulting in art composed of “reflections and shadows”. It is to the credit of Ensor, and of Rik Wouters a little later, that colour was ‘unleashed’ in Flemish, or rather Belgian, painting. This was one of the biggest shifts in modern art, one that would subsequently lead to the autonomous colours used by artists such as Mondrian. It was Ensor and Wouters, two Post-Impressionist colourists, who reintroduced colour; predominately primary, expressive, complementary hues such as red, blue, yellow and green. Fast forward to today, more than a hundred years on, to the panoramic, technicolour works of Ben Sledsens, who as a child of his time (thus born long after Marcel Duchamp’s assemblages and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup) and like a veritable pickup artist, is once again adopting Ensor’s and Wouters’ riot of colour. Sledsens combines Wouters’ thematic joie de vivre with Ensor’s monumentality. His palette, with its heavy use of pink, yellow, green and purple, is softer and more romantic, thanks to the mixture of colours he employs. His range of colours gives an orientalist, almost decorative slant to the hushed, dayto-day scenes of homely conviviality. Depth and perspective are achieved through tone-on-tone colour combinations on smooth, sprawling canvases.

According to Goethe’s 1810 colour theory3 – though this is not a hypothesis in the sense of Newton’s thesis on gravity – colours are chiefly perceived via the processing of sensory stimuli of both light and dark, and not just through subjective perception based on natural laws governing the incidence of light (for example, think of the many internet discussions in 2015 about the subjective perception of the colours of ‘the dress’). In Goethe’s interpretation, white light represents good (in Sledsens’ work, the female element often has a yellow halo, which may or may not have been produced by a mass of blond hair), red and pink represent the beautiful (a pinkish red is often used to colour the skies and the backgrounds), and purple expresses restlessness, but also sophistication and decoration. Purple can therefore be seen as a superfluous colour, an ornament, which lends extra depth to that which is beautiful and good. Hence Sledsens’ work unleashes colour in a totally unique way: the frequently mixed shades become a representation of both a state of mind and of the emotional connotations of these nuances, thus taking on a symbolic stratification. A yellow bird set against a pink background looks somewhat sweeter than another of its kind set against a red background, and the use of magenta – the name of which is derived from the deep red pools of blood on the battlefield at Magenta – lends a threatening depth to a seemingly innocent scene.

Whilst we can position Sledsens as a grandson of Post-Impressionism in the Belgian colour tradition, when considered at an international level his work is more closely related to the Orientalist and Fauvist palettes of Matisse and Le Douanier Rousseau, with whom Sledsens shares both colour usage and motifs. In Sledsens’ work, green, regarded by Goethe as the most useful and restful colour, is a realistic hue whose multiple nuances portray the wonders of nature; from wild jungles and charming trees, to houseplants and the wares of a Borgerhout florist. The colour represents a certain down-to-earth quality, a sense of reality, even when depicting exotica. Sledsens’ overarching lust for life, or at times euphoric reverie, is thus often tempered by the theme of the dark forest, a ‘naive’ motif that creates a contrasting world of shadows. Just as Goethe’s teaching posits that colour is only created through the confrontation between light and darkness, as well as their combination, and that shadow is part of the light, so do Sledsens’ idyllic tableaux exist only thanks to their contrast with the dark forest. Ratio and emotion alternate in green, yellow and pink. In Sledsens’ work, we generally see the realistic scenes from everyday life depicted in primary colours (a red rear light, red roofs, a grey sky), whilst