Annotations on Colour: Curatorial Statement
In 1876, the city of Jaipur was painted pink to welcome the Prince of Wales, and this chromatic uniformity has been maintained as an urban mandate ever since. More than an architectural curiosity, the Pink City functions as a civic syntax: colour here is not background, but a public language — hospitality and warmth as governance, beauty as civic discipline. Jaipur is a city trained in pigment, where colour regulates atmosphere, perception, and social comportment. This exhibition takes that condition not as context, but as premise.
The exhibition developed at the Jaipur Centre for the Arts approaches colour as an active phenomenon rather than a descriptive attribute. Colour is understood not as symbol or ornament, but as event — something that unfolds in time, transforms in space, and implicates the body of the viewer. As has been articulated within modern and kinetic practices, colour may be experienced as an autonomous, evolving phenomenon, existing independently of form and continuously reconfigured by light, movement, and perception. The works brought together here treat colour as a structure of perception: optical events, material intensities, and chromatic systems that are completed only through the viewer’s movement and the shifting conditions of light. In Jaipur — where light is vertical, unforgiving, and revelatory—this perceptual instability becomes central.
This curatorial position finds deep resonance within Indian philosophical thought, where light and colour are are imbued with sacred meaning. The Upanishads describe an eternal light as the seed of the world – “that great light which is the cause of the world”. This is a light beyond sun or moon, a supreme illumination: “There the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars… From his light all these give light, and his radiance illumines all creation”. Such verses portray physical light as a metaphor for Brahman (the ultimate reality), and darkness as ignorance to be dispelled. Even perception itself is spiritualized: the Mahabharata notes “The Eye sees forms when aided by the Mind but never by itself”, suggesting that true sight is an inner, enlightened vision beyond mere optics.
In these ancient texts, color carries cosmic symbolism. Early Vedic hymns speak of Ushas, the dawn, robed in saffron and red hues – colors of fire and transformation. Saffron (bhagwa) emerges renunciation and sacrifice, while later Hindu philosophy associates the triad of gunas with chromatic states: white with sattva (clarity and equilibrium), red with rajas (activity and desire), and black with tamas (concealment and inertia). Colour thus operates as a map of consciousness. It signals not only what is seen, but how one is oriented toward the world. Thus the chromatic language of the ancients linked the seen spectrum to unseen values – from the black-blue skin of Krishna as all-attractive mystery to the fiery red of Agni as life’s energy. This exhibition is rooted in these semiotics without illustration, asking instead how contemporary abstraction can reactivate such registers — how black may operate not only as absence but as absorption and protection; how red may become threshold, warning, vitality, or ritual; how colour may function as an ethics of attention.
Across modern and contemporary abstraction, artists have long insisted on colour’s affective and psychological force. Color directly influences the soul, likened to music — an immaterial vibration capable of producing inner resonance. In minimalist practices, colour and luminosity become immersive phenomena capable of transforming spatial and perceptual experience. Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation environments, for instance, flood architecture with pure coloured light, activating in the viewer “the notion of colour as a material or physical situation… going into space without the aid of any form.” Emerging from the legacies of Op Art and the Light and Space movement, such practices draw on optical science and visual psychology to isolate colour and light as primary agents. Daniel Buren’s practice instead is deeply guided by his will – ‘a juxtaposition of contrasting colors,’ while an artist Ai Wei Wei uses monochrome as idealogy, and Anish Kapoor’s employs color to alter the depth of space beyond language ‘indescribable with words.’ Colour is treated not as an attribute of form, but as subject itself — an almost living presence that can destabilize perception, generate affect, and reorient attention.
The selected works in this exhibition move across this expanded chromatic field — from dense, absorptive surfaces and void-like colour zones, to kinetic and optical propositions where spectatorship itself becomes the medium, to dispersed constellations of colour that speak to circulation, displacement, and social memory. In each case, colour is not inert; it acts. It is at once physical and not physical—material and affective, bodily and metaphysical — producing sensation before language and response before interpretation.
Ultimately, this exhibition positions colour as both ancient and urgently contemporary, precisely because it is deeply human. Colour is biological — rooted in the physics of light and the physiology of vision — and cultural, shaped by history, belief, and collective memory. In a world saturated by algorithmic images and flattened chromatics, these works insist on colour as lived experience: slow, demanding, and irreducible. Situated within Jaipur — a city already governed by pigment and light — the exhibition proposes colour as a site of relation, where perception, emotion, and shared experience are continuously evolving.
Curatorial statement courtesy of Margarita Demina.