What draws us to a colour? What were the colours that accompanied us in childhood, when we would say with conviction: "This is my favourite colour!"?
And now, if I were asked about my favourite colour, what would I answer? What does it mean to have a favourite colour? Does it mean I wear it often? That I flood my house with objects and walls painted in it?
And when it comes to an artist, could there be a colour that insists, that imposes itself over the others in a body of work?
Currently, I am blue.
I'm blue.
Part of the photographic documentation of La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo #3, a performance-installation made in January 2025, Cruce / Madrid © Photo: Pedro Mendes, Pablo Estrada
“We are quickly infected by the English melancholy. It is a sheepish, stunned melancholy, a sort of empty bewilderment, and on its surface the conversations about the weather, the seasons — about all those things one can discuss without going too deeply into anything, without giving offence or being offended — linger like the constant quiet buzzing of mosquitoes.”
— Natalia Ginzburg, excerpt from The Little Virtues (1962)
I’m not quite sure how I arrived at blue.
I vaguely remember beginning to register blue elements in public — often grey — spaces in London, one of the cities where I have lived over the past five years, since I left Brazil, the country where I was born and raised. Often feeling lonely in that immense city, which can superficially even seem welcoming, encountering something blue felt like a comforting encounter with myself.
My artistic process begins by walking through the city via the practice of the dérive, and in this movement through spaces, I accumulate objects and infra-ordinary fragments, as proposed by Georges Perec, which also serve as clues that often only reveal a possible meaning afterwards.
Two years ago, I began a master’s degree at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, at a moment when I started to give clearer contours to my artistic practice. Some of these contours subtly emerged in the colour blue.
Photographic documentation "Azul Everywhere" by Amanda Gatti. 1. Paris (2024); 2. London (2022); 3. Barcelona (2025). Courtesy of Amanda Gatti.
Initially, they took the form of lines—blue lines that framed documents and also traced on the floor, suggested an exhibition route, a movement along the site-specific exhibition Inventario (2023, Madrid) — my final master’s project in which I transformed my studio flat into an art gallery, presenting pieces created with and from my belongings, and from the house itself – that large-scale object.
With those lines, I follow the trace of Edward Krasiński, a Ukrainian artist who in his works challenged the fixed nature of sculptures and spaces.
“In the early 1970s he began to create installations which experimented with alternative ways of presenting and experiencing art. Krasiński transformed galleries into maze-like spaces through the use of cleverly positioned plinths, hanging objects and blue adhesive tape.”
— (Tate Modern, n.d).
View of Inventario, a site-specific exhibition - September-October 2023 / Madrid. Courtesy of Amanda Gatti
Shortly after, between November and December 2023, I installed myself for 12 consecutive days (30 minutes per day) in the small display window of DT Scenic Area in Chueca, playing with realities and planes of that minimal space, allowing those walking down the street and those inside the venue to see a flexible landscape that connected the inside and the outside, introducing blue elements as a way of revealing possible versions of that emptiness.
If in Inventario I was working on and with a domestic space, in Escaparate I was interested in the idea of the "non-place" — that in-between space that I also came to understand, at some point, as a territory I occupy as a migrant person.
Until then, I did not have a strong intention with the colour blue – I confess that I used it purely for aesthetic pleasure, as it is a vibrant and deep colour, easily seen in public space, appearing from time to time dyed in workers' uniforms and scaffold netting, to road signs. In Madrid, the city where I ended up settling, for instance, the public buses are all blue — they are like moving blocks of colour cutting through the city on a daily basis.
Part of the documentation for Showcase, a durational performance-installation - November-December 2023 / Madrid © Photo: Pedro Mendes
“Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape.”
— Maggie Nelson, excerpt from Bluets (2009)
While working with some photographic series, I found myself returning to the documentation initiated in London in 2021. It was then that I understood this proposition as an ongoing series: Azul Anywhere. Here I became obsessed once and for all with the colour blue – speaking in full plenitude – and what began as a casual documentation turned into an almost ethnographic search: collecting blue fragments in the places I pass through. This accumulation led me to think that colour is also a space in itself.
Monochromatic elements — in different shapes and sizes — redefine the landscape and the emptiness. I think of Yves Klein, who applied his patented blue (International Klein Blue) to different surfaces, expanding them towards the immaterial.
Photographic documentation "Azul Everywhere" by Amanda Gatti. 1. Madrid (2024); 2. Dublin (2025); 3. Brussels (2024); 4. Luxembourg (2024). Courtesy of Amanda Gatti.
Despite working across various media – performance, video, photography, and installation – my artworks have become increasingly infused with blue.
One day, someone asked me: “Why blue?”
Since then, that question has followed me.
This year, a close friend, noticing the persistence of blue in my works, gave me the book Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I read it in a single afternoon, and I want to read it many more times, because I found it deeply inspiring. A personal and poetic writing – which does not reduce itself to an autobiography – builds bridges to think of blue in relation to love, pain, and loneliness.
Frames of Mapa Azul, a video art and object project (2024). Photograph courtesy of Amanda Gatti
My works have been influenced by the idea of space – how we occupy and are occupied by the spaces around us. Delving deep into my memory, I realise that my interests are not only related to my migratory processes but also to the fact that part of my family comes from engineering, architecture, and mechanics. I grew up surrounded by constructions, projects, and structures that seemed solid, but for me, they were never exactly synonymous with permanence or rigidity. On the contrary, I must have been around 7 years old when I started playing at assembling and disassembling a series of “floors plans” with bricks in my grandparents' backyard, as imaginary boundaries for houses that would never be built, that were nothing more than malleable structures. Just like in childhood games, to this day I am not satisfied with the form of things; I mainly believe in experimentation – and in the poetics of the gesture.
For the past three years, in my research, I have explored the tension between materiality and functionality, ephemerality and displacement. In La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo (a performance-installation series), I fuse my body with objects in order to create ephemeral architectural figures. Discarded objects, collected from the streets and painted blue, are incorporated into the body, generating a functional displacement that gives rise to a monochromatic and dense body-space, defined by accumulation and the precariousness of the forms. From this mutability between body and object, I hold these compositions for as long as possible, evoking ruins sustained in the landscape, unstable and transient.
Here, blue becomes a gesture.
Photo documentation of La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo #3, performance-installation by Amanda Gatti presented in January 2025 at Cruce / Madrid © Photo: Pedro Mendes
At this moment, I am in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, and I can easily spot splashes of blue throughout the city. Perhaps my gaze has already been trained to spot it wherever I go; however, here, the predominance of green is undeniable – which overwhelms me a bit.
As I reach the conclusion of this brief essay, I realise that blue, for me, is above all a symptom. It is a colour associated with various definitions throughout the history of the world, and despite my attempts to define it, I still don’t fully understand what led me to blue – or if it was blue that came to me.
I am an artist who prioritises the process, which is always unique in each project, as it is intrinsically tied to my life. Now I understand that I need to go through this blue, let it manifest without trying to contain it.
I wonder: What will come after blue ?
Photographic documentation "Azul Everywhere" by Amanda Gatti. 1. Madrid (2024); 2. Cuenca (2025). Photo courtesy of Amanda Gatti.
Lastly, I make a few references to Estudo para um enriquecimento interior, by Helena Almeida, Blue, by Joni Mitchell, O Eu e o Tu: Série Roupa-Corpo-Roupa, by Lygia Clark, and Blue, by Derek Jarman. My list of references is extensive, perhaps leaving that topic for another occasion.
Credits:
English translation by Pedro Mendes
