Do azul ao vazio: em defesa da cor emancipada

Abstract

In his text Overcoming the Problematics of Art (1959) Yves Klein wrote that he had overcome the “problematics of art”. For Klein, the core of this problem lays in the way in which the spectator and the painter related to painting until the end of the 1950’s: “painting was a function of the eye”. Klein believed that the Western spectator's gaze would be too idle, lazy, just as the painter’s would be influenced by such context, he would also have been in a kind of sensitive stagnation. Following Klein's line of reasoning, the consequence of this idle mutual relationship is that painting itself would be trapped in an endless cycle. This would be the problematic of art and this would also be the problem that Klein would have fought. It is in this context that Klein is interested in pure color and its capacity for spatial impregnation. A quality that would have the ability to overcome any vision addiction. Only through the emancipation of color would painting reach another type of relationship with the spectator and with the painter himself. Interested in how Klein defended that he had overcome the problem of art and, consequently, emancipated color, this master's thesis started from an analyticalbibliographical approach considering a specific time frame in the chronology of the artist's career: 1954 to 1959, in order to defend the Klein's color emancipation argument. The theoretical framework was based on Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of imagination, mainly in the texts of the book Air and Dreams (2001) / [1943]. Bachelard clearly described this idleness as an overvaluation of the sense of sight (ocularist perspective). The philosopher opposes this ocularist perspective by stating that the poet/artist would have to invite the spectator to imagine. Bachelard understands imagination as a faculty capable of generating a departure from pure contemplation. Only in imagination would we be able to decompose the images captured by vision and thus recycle what was seen a priori. In this research I also address the difficulty of perceiving an artist like Yves Klein as a member of the New Realists.