Colour Complex by Pierre le Riche

PIERRE LE RICHE COLOUR COMPLEX

Colour and Form Anna Stielau

I There’s a photograph I like of the designer Halston in Andy Warhol’s summer home in the Hamptons. He’s reading, a book slightly too big to be serious open in front of him. The room is gracefully decorated and subtly lit. Behind him is an well-stocked bookshelf. At first the picture isn’t striking – it has something of the snapshot about it, in the casualness of the moment and the man. But there’s an undercurrent of wrongness that is, at first, hard to qualify. Suddenly it becomes apparent that every book on the shelf has been flipped so that the spine faces the wall. There are only undifferentiated pages now; books as paper and hue. Books as surface.

II The theorist Jennifer Doyle describes this gesture as brutal and bracing. While it isn’t clear if the décor is Halston’s or Warhol’s, it doesn’t really matter. The end result troubles the bourgeois sensibilities of the space in a sly, radical way. The inverted books literalise “the ambivalent place of narrative within contemporary art” through an insistence on these units of knowledge as object—not an art object, but a form shaped by one system and deployed unapologetically in another. This is, for Doyle, the embodiment of queer formalism: “a totally rejection of a certain kind of discourse on culture and value” in favour of something new and strange1.

Jennifer Doyle in conversation with David Getsy, 2013, Queer Formalism, http://artjournal. collegeart.org/?p=4468

III Can there even be a queer formalism? In many ways the idea is a paradox. The word formalist conjures up images of Clement Greenberg grimacing over his glasses as some mid-century modernist throws paint at a canvas. Its remit is overwhelmingly white, masculinist and implicitly straight – an invite-only club that represents the culmination of a linear Euro-American art history. Queerness is corporeal, making meaning from the very body that high modernism sought to evacuate from art. It is vital, transgressive and political. “Queer” and “formalist” sit uncomfortably side by side, then, but perhaps they animate each other in unpredictable ways. There is power in friction.

IV The minimalist sculptor Robert Morris knows something about that power. Morris said that simple shapes do not equate to simple experiences on the part of either artist or viewer. “Unitary forms do not reduce relationships. They order them,” he maintains. Driving the point home, Morris posed in full fetish leathers for Artforum in 1974. No simple relations there. His body – his life – was forcibly reinstated both as an extension of his work and in opposition to it. Camp minimalism raises some of the same questions as queer formalism, does it not? How can we be in our bodies and of our bodies but not only our bodies? How do we authorise a form (or shape or colour) that is neither figurative nor always already straight? Is there such a thing?

V When the filmmaker Derek Jarman made his masterpiece, Blue (1993), it was in a revolt against regimes of representation that had failed him. Jarman, blind and slowly dying of AIDS, purged the visual realm of everything except chromaticity: the colour blue. It shimmers on screen like a field and a horizon. “How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all?” he asks in the subtitles, “For the most part we are invisible.”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.” Colour is more than a property of light or a property of objects. It is a part of us – an effect of how our brains process the world. And in this, it is limited only by imagination. From his deathbed Jarman baptises us in blue. In turn, he asks that we live in full colour.

VI I have been considering Pierre Le Riche’s Colour Complex as I write this, wondering what it means to proffer a visual field beyond the pandemonium of images (Jarman) and the architectonic (Morris). Le Riche’s Gradations dissolve a veil of colour into pixels, each embroidered onto open weave cotton. The elusive materiality of these shapes recalls Morris’s early work with felt and razor wire, and even has some of the playfulness of Warhol’s library about it. Each surface is treated in a manner too controlled to be painterly, too abstract to be easy and too bold to ignore. Le Riche’s Colour Cages fracture the spectrum further, breaking it into bands that bump up against each other companionably but not wholly without tension. One in particular, Colour Cage #1 (2016), is a vibrating rainbow matrix that threatens to swallow the viewer into its indeterminate internal spaces.

I spend the most time in front of this work, struggling to see it and somehow uncomfortable. I write the words too loud on my notepad. I cannot hear myself think above the noise of the colours. What is queer about colours like these? Everything. They shout. They are hot and they are vulgar. They tremble on the page and yet they stand their ground. They pulsate.

VII Maggie Nelson begin her lyrical meditation on colour, Bluets, as follows: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a colour. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious.”2 Why this love, the poet is asked. Why give yourself over to deep feeling for something as quotidian as colour? Because we don’t get to choose what or whom we love, she answers. We just don’t get to choose.

Maggie Nelson, 2009, Bluets, Seattle and NY: Wave Books.