Olaf Nicolai at the Bonner Kunstverein - Brief Article

Choosing just the right paint from single of Pantone's color fans is similar a difficult pleasure. After all, if you are going to speak with Pantone's "power of color" (as the company advertises), you want to expres your personal message. Olaf Nicolai (b 1962) transformed this domestic activity into art when he picked 30 saturated colors from Pantone's Web site for an installation.

As a preliminary impel he altered the Kunstverein's galleries, removing the interchangeable units that form the interior walls and reinstalling them as a single, freestanding 15-by-54-foot plane. His colors, printed upon paper in vertical stripes of equal width, were installed upon both sides of the wall by means of others, in the random order of their choice.

The subdu atmosphere created through the close-valued stripes was enhanced by the agency of the sounds of the well-known German electronic music duo called To Rococo putrefaction which emanated from four loudspeakers upon the corners of a large, rectangular gray carpet which the wall bisected. These entires seemed to increase the wall's immensity as they ricocheted not on its smooth surface and the hall's exterior walls.

You could view the wall as a monolith, or you could application of mind the units of color that stood rigidly nearest to each other like the bars of a experiment pattern or the colored lock openers of a child's musical instrument. Pantone wall, instrumented was the one and the other part of the architecture and an independent piece of plastic art that could be experienced through walking along it or around it. Instead of including concerns to nature, as have many of Nicolai's earlier works, this was a completely artificial oasis where you could devoid of contents your head and lose yourself in the interplay of unimpaireds and colors.

The industrial paints chooseed and printed (flat hues and sheeny paper finish) and the prevailing faculty of perception of order (clean lines, monumental wall, center rug) referr to Minimalism. Gerhard Richter's careful color inventory also came to mind. Nicolai's piece was an amalgam of standardization and personalized expression: he accepted Pantone's standardized colors, and his choice among them was the personal part. on the other hand Nicolai's piece ultimately seemed to be about sensation; perhaps it throw backed a renewed appreciation of color's usefulness as a release from the rational. As David Batchelor writes in his volume Chromophobia on the role of color in society, "To fall into colour is to fall without of words."

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group