when sensibility had no crannies...

just as the impressionists of whom i consider myself a descendant, just as, more directly, DELACROIX of whom i consider myself a disciple, i stroll about and consider sympathetic states, a real or imaginary landscape, an object, a person, or quite simply a cloud of unknown sensibility through which by chance i suddenly traverse, an ambiance...

from the voiceless conversation that ensues between these state of things and myself, an impalpable affinity is born, "indefinable," as DELACROIX would say. it is this "indefinable," this inexpressible poetic moment, that i desire to fix on my canvas since my mode of being (notice i am not saying expression) is to make paintings. And so i paint the pictorial moment that is born of an illumination by impregnation in life itself.

"...to feel the soul without explanation, without vocabulary, and to represent that feeling... this is, i believe, foremost among the reasons that led me to the monochrome!"

for me the art of painting is to produce, to create freedom in the first material state.

the lines, bars of a psychological prison, as i see, it are certainly in ourselves and in nature, but they are our chains; they are the concretization of our mortal state, our sentimentality, our intellect, limiting our spiritual realm. they are our heredity, our education, our vices, our aspirations, our qualities, our gimmicks... in short, they are our psychological world in its entirety, down to its most subtle crannies.

color, on the contrary, on a human and natural scale, is that which is most immersed in cosmic sensibility. sensibility has no crannies; it is like humidity in the air. color, for me, is the "materialization" of sensibility.

color permeates everything just as indefinable sensibility permeates without form and without limit. it is spacial matter that is at once abstract and real.

the line may be infinite, just as the spiritual is, but the line does not have the capacity to fill the all-encompassing immeasurability; it does not posses the capacity of color to impregnate everything.

from "the monochrome adventure" in overcoming the problematics of art, the writings of yves klein