I Don't Mistrust Reality, Of Which I

I First Came Up With The Idea For The Colour-chart Pictures Back In 1966, And My Preoccupation With The Topic Culminated In 1974 With A Painting That Consisted Of 4,096 Colour Fields. Initially I Was Attracted By The Typical Pop Art Aestheticism Of Using Standard Colour-sample Cards; I Preferred The Unartistic, Tasteful And Secular Illustration Of The Different Tones To The Paintings Of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, Etc.

To Me, Grey Is The Welcome And Only Possible Equivalent For Indifference, Noncommitment, Absence Of Opinion, Absence Of Shape. But Grey, Like Formlessness And The Rest, Can Be Real Only As An Idea, And So All I Can Do Is Create A Colour Nuance That Means Grey But Is Not It. The Painting Is Then A Mixture Of Grey As A Fiction And Grey As A Visible, Designated Area Of Colour.

The Year Is Always Correct, Also The Month, Only The Day Can Be Another. But That Occurs To Me Only In The Moment Of Writing It Down.

I Don't Mistrust Reality, Of Which I Know Next To Nothing. I Mistrust The Picture Of Reality Conveyed To Us By Our Senses, Which Is Imperfect And Circumscribed.

I've Never Found Anything To Be Lacking In A Blurry Canvas. Quite The Contrary: You Can See Many More Things In It Than In A Sharply Focused Image. A Landscape Painted With Exactness Forces You To See A Determined Number Of Clearly Differentiated Trees, While In A Blurry Canvas You Can Perceive As Many Trees As You Want. The Painting Is More Open.