Ensemble

Meditating on colour

Colour, light and texture: Jef Verheyen uses them to make us think about emptiness. He finds inspiration for this in East Asian thinking and in traditional Chinese artistic crafts. To paint with one colour (monochrome) or with the absence of colour (achrome)? After 1957 Verheyen ponders this question. His meeting with Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana in Milan at the end of 1958 increases his desire to experiment. Shortly after this he plans an Antwerp exhibition of international monochrome painters.

That project is abandoned. But in 1960 a similar exhibition is held in Leverkusen, Germany. Verheyen and the monochrome painters put themselves firmly on the map. Their ‘artless art’ offers an alternative to the refined touch of the Impressionists and the grand gesture of the Abstract Expressionists. For them, only the poetry of pure matter counts, of colour or absence of colour. Because, as Verheyen writes: ‘In a monochrome or achrome painting, light must be felt rather than seen.’