Following our previous collaboration on Chromoscreen 01 and 02 for Tate, Atelier JI are pleased to present Chromophilia, a suite of twelve screen prints by David Batchelor.

Since the 1990s, Batchelor has maintained an ongoing dialogue with colour through sculpture, photography, drawing, writing and printmaking. His influential text Chromophobia investigates how colour in western culture has often been cast as the villain, feared or perceived as a dangerous element. Chromophilia, by contrast, is a direct celebration of colour’s vitality and presence.

This new suite extends Batchelor’s ongoing investigation of stacked colour and form, translating his sculptural and collage-based practice into richly layered works on paper.

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.

Each print presents a one-off balance of semi-regular shapes. Torn edges interrupt the apparent precision of the forms, recalling the rough surfaces and imperfect contours of Batchelor’s concrete sculptures.

The series emerged through a process of reduction and transformation. Existing sculptural works were translated into collages, where cut and torn paper became equivalents for cast concrete forms. These collages in turn became the basis for the screen prints.

The collages are derived from an on-going group of spray-painted concrete sculptures, which are in turn adapted from another group of sculptures. That is the way work gets made in my studio: everything is partially connected to what came before it and will have some relationship with what comes after it. As a result, there is no clear starting point or end point.

I wanted every stack to have its own unique play of colours. I wanted the colours to be as vivid as possible, but also to be dense and as physical as possible.

Over a period of five months, David worked directly with master printer Peter Bennett to achieve a unique finish using specialist inks. His totems of colour lift from the substrate, their edges present, the sculpture existing once again.

Screen printing can produce the strongest, sharpest colours, and it can also allow those colours to sit on the paper rather than be absorbed into it. The results are even better than I expected them to be.