David Batchelor: 'Chromophilia'
David Batchelor has had a constant dialogue with colour in print, sculpture, words, drawings and photography since his very first solo exhibitions in the 1990s. In one of his most popular written texts, Chromophobia, he investigates how colour in Western culture has often been cast as the villain, feared or perceived as a dangerous element.
In Chromophilia, Batchelor celebrates colour, holding his sculptural works in mind whilst playfully reimagining them as two dimensional colour fields, the geometry countered with torn elements and then committed to print where specialist ink allow his totems of colour to lift from the substrate, edges become present, the sculpture existing once again.
“Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it. To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.”
- David Batchelor