It can be hard to put into words precisely how one feels or thinks about a particular colour, and it can be hard to define what it’s like to find oneself inside of one particular room, as opposed to being inside other rooms. Ane Vester’s works inspire one to become more conscious of these fleeting sensations of space and colour. 

 

In the series of Stripe Paintings the relationship between colour and context is subtly present. They consist of vertical colour stripes on a white background. The stripes have been painted on the back side of Plexi panels, in such a way that the colours seem to recede into the surface, while at the same time the pictures’ surfaces very slightly reflect the surrounding space, including the light and the viewer’s body. The stripe format relates to the architectural surroundings by reiterating the room’s other vertical structures.

 

The ‘pale’ “Scrovegni Stripe Paintings with their various combinations of pale complementary colours are inspired by a visit to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua where Vester observed how Giotto had created light and shimmer by opposing pale unsaturated complementary colours in the “stripe like” draperies of the figures.  

 

The various individual combinations of red and blue presented in the Red & Blue Stripe Paintings as well as in some of the wooden works each call on unique associations and thus undermine the polarizing concept (think of warm/cold, boy/girl, political opposites…) of this archetypical colour combination.

 

Alongside the Stripe Paintings Vester presents a series of works taking on the form of painted objects built up from wooden blocks. The colour-related aspect settles into tangible things that serve to activate the surrounding space by physically intermeshing in it. The painted wooden objects are mounted onto the wall as hybrids between painting, sculpture and everyday objects. The naming of the works as shelves, beams and signs serves to accentuate their affinity with everyday furniture.

 

To conclude Vester shows four small geometric paintings playfully questioning the absoluteness of the pure primary colours as known from various colour theories and art historical movements.

 

The colors in Vesters works are being chosen and combined because they exist (or existed) beyond and prior to the painting in actual reality. However, even though the paintings relate themselves to memories of certain colored phenomena, they are also detaching themselves from these phenomena. They both are and are no longer linked up with the world of things that existed beforehand. The color is always, also, something else, a kind of emancipation, an event within the now, and a potentially new experience.
The American writer Gertrude Stein had a keen sensibility for these kinds of paradoxes, as comes to light in this passage from Tender Buttons, dating from 1914:

'The change of colour is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared.'

 

Based on fragments from The resonance of Colour by Magnus Thorø Clausen, translation Dan Marmorstein.

​

​