The title ‘Who’s afraid of RGBlue’ 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. This 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.
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 a permanent illumination of the Dexia Tower. The proposed artworks in the ‘who’s afraid of RGB’ project edition are all based on the elementary code of light, by researching a symbolic value proper to the status of the tower being an urban, thus collective, sign.
The first artwork of the series, 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). The second variation, the weather.tower relates coloured lights to tenvironmental conditions while relating temperature to colour, wind directions to pattern …