Who's afraid of red, green and blue
Location:
Brussels' Dexia Tower
Commissioner: Dexia
Artists: LAb[au]
Copyright images: Artists: LAb[au] - Architects: Philippe Samyn & Partners, M & J.M. Jaspers - J. Eyers & Partners - Lighting engineer: Barbara Hediger
The title 'Who's afraid of Red, Green and Blue' refers to the 1950's series 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue' from the American artist Barnett Newman, one of the major figures of the 'colour field painters'. He used large, hard edged areas of saturated colours punctuated by narrow coloured vertical bands. see image who's afraid of red yellow and blueThis vocabulary reduces painting to its very elements such as colours and proportions, a painting in its most pure state, freed of any figurative aspects. Moreover, Newman's works were searching for a symbolic expression in abstract art, rather than an auto-referential language of its constituting elements.
Contrary to a first rather polemic understanding, the title establishes a rhetoric question confronting the meaning and means of painting, as it directly questions the relationship in between the painting (object) and the viewer (subject).
In this sense, the reference to the Barnett Newman series' is based on the research of a vocabulary of colour and shapes as a proper language for an enlightening of the Dexia Tower.
The proposed artworks in the 'who's afraid of RGB' cycle are all based on the elementary codes of light see image RGB, by researching a symbolic value proper to the status of the tower being an urban, thus collective, sign.During a longer period, different variations on this theme will enlighten the facade of the tower to establish step by step the vocabulary of the tower enlightening while allowing to experiment and finalize a version which than will run every day for a long period.
The first artwork of the series, the chrono.tower see image chrono.tower, relates the basic units of time to the primary colours of light while using RGB as a code for hours (= R), minutes (= G) and seconds (= B). see image The second variation, the weather.tower see image weather.tower relates the coloured lights of the tower to the environmental weather conditions while relating temperature to colour, wind directions to pattern ... see image weather-tower colour-code
Additionally, the artwork can be downloaded in form of a widget, a small desktop application, which one can install on his/her personal computer see image widget. This widget allows you to follow the process on your computer similar to the running artwork on the tower. The widget expresses one of the major project focus the symbolic relation between the private, individual and public, collective, space.
The who's afraid of rgb edition researches a permanent enlightening, based on generative art and forms one of the three program types foreseen for the enlightening of the tower.
