Catalogue for MADS Milano Kromoatic@rt Exhibition 2021:

KROMATIC@RT 2021

International Contemporary Art exhibition

 

Concept edited by Art Curators

Erika Gravante -graduated in Product Design, master in Visual Merchandising-

Federica D’Avanzo -graduated in Art Management-

 

 

“Each person has his own color, a shade whose light just leaks along the contours of the body.

A kind of halo. As in the figures seen against the light”

 

(Haruki Murakami)

 

Our life is like the palette of a painter in which each color identifies things, emotions, thoughts and moods. Its deep beauty intoxicates us and strikes us, inspires us. Its capacity for expression can produce multisensory perceptions. Speaking about colors means to shine a light on our path, to give back to the man the right to wonder, to have peace, to have that serenity that only they know how to transmit. It is well known how contemporary art or cinema have rediscovered with new awareness and curiosity, the effects that colors and lights have on the human mind, investigating the perception of reality, emotionality and unconsciousness. Alfred Hitchcock, in one of his many masterpieces, Vertigo, uses a chromatic choice that will contribute to give a ghostly and surreal aura to the entire sequence; David Lynch makes use of marked tones, or the contrast of the same. In art in particular, through the colourations, we not only access painting in its integrity but we collect an inexhaustible series of emotional states that, in part or in whole, can justify the existence of the paintings as a symphony of tones. One can argue that art history is a history of palettes, and each artist had his own, and with it he opened his deepest self. The works appear as a gallery of melodies and harmonies, whose nuances lead us beyond the real concrete to access the feelings in an immediate way, as happens with music. Looking at a work, the eye is touched by a broad emotional spectrum, in which the artist leads us into an unusual territory where its thousand colors paint the universe filling our senses with joy. Colour is, in fact, an element of fundamental importance for human life, and it is precisely through it that the senses learn reality. It has an aesthetic role, but above all an imposing symbolic value, linked for example to day and night, to light and darkness, which has always accompanied men. Each tone possesses a great psychological power capable of acting on the emotional state of each individual, communicating a message firmly rooted in the culture of those who observe it. In many tribes, for example, the color painted on the body indicates social status, while throughout the world, the gradation of the skin is considered attractive according to the beauty canons dictated by the culture itself. However, we should reflect more carefully on the human condition and check if the world really knows how to recognize its level of chromatic maturity. Eskimos, for example, use 100 different definitions to describe the white gradations of snow, in France brown is a nuance, a word in itself, while in Italy it is an adjective. It is evident that a color alone is solemn and imposing in all its majesty: but what happens when two colors meet? In the chromatic combination most of the time emerges a play of forces, an "arm wrestling" that makes the character and expressiveness. The first dominates the second, they push each other: one asks the other to approach its complementary. As in any relationship, one color asks the other to "change". This encounter of energies creates a powerful vibration, not real but strong in the visual perception of the eye. This is what makes a chromatic combination more or less pleasant, dynamic, static, expressive, lively that can fatigue us to the point of looking away. The Fauves did it on purpose: they chose to match pairs of complementary colors so that the two colors would light each other. Violent and explosive encounters of this kind are visible in the canvases of Emil Nolde, a German expressionist capable of visionary and unthinkable chromatic choices. For him "the colours are vibrations of silver bells and bronze sounds: they announce happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death". The color in both grandeur is so strongly expressive that it becomes a symbol of a nation, characterizes its history, culture, philosophy, expresses its identity and vocation, drama and conquest, pride, and beauty. The world entrusts peace to this important means of expression, through which we can read the life of a state, a city, a province, a region, or a small commune. A distinctive sign of who we are, of what language we speak, of what we have done and of what we want to tell. Therefore, the aim of the exhibition "Kromatic@rt" promoted by M.A.D.S. MILANO is to enter into a journey of images able to go beyond the figuration itself, reaching almost abstraction. The intent is to involve the viewer into the dense colors and be moved by the soul of the artists, who choose to use the visual element of color in its completeness as the creative force of their work. Light, tone, shape, symbol, harmony, contrast, mood. A powerful chromatic perception, but with a sensory language, mute and silent, able to communicate more than words themselves. An explosive and disruptive rainbow, out of the box.

 

"Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours;

let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow”

 

(Khalil Gibran)