Colors have no inherent meanings, but through popular use and adoption by governments, religious entities, and brands, they have often acquired extremely strong connotations, serving to communicate national, political, business, and cultural values without the need for words.
This charge of meaning is paradoxically universal and subjective: colors that communicate certain values in one context do not necessarily retain the same meaning in another. Contemporary artists, especially those who work with conceptual art or abstraction, frequently use color and its connotations to convey ideas to the viewer or to imbue an existing image with new meaning, without the need to invoke figuration.
Cristina Lucas and Walid Raad are examples of artists who have recognized the great communicative power of color. Although they have very different aesthetic visions and employ disparate techniques, they share an understanding that color is not something "innocent," free of symbolic or ideological burdens. On the contrary, these artists exploit the connections between color and its representative and literal value, using it as a tool to critique political and economic systems.
Cristina Lucas, Blue Monochrome, 2016. Image courtesy of Cristina Lucas
Cristina Lucas, a tribute to Suprematism
In her series Monocromos (2016), contemporary Andalusian artist Cristina Lucas (Jaén, 1973) explores the connection between color, 20th-century social movements, the psychology of consumption, and capitalism. Lucas, who currently lives and works in Madrid, frequently investigates the power relations at work in our society, revealing their effects on us and the environment. Here, and with her parallel series Bicromos, the artist uses superimposed brand logos to create works that from a distance appear abstract and devoid of real-world references, when in fact the works have multiple layers of significance: paying homage to the Russian Suprematists and the birth of monochrome as a medium ; showing the evolution of color psychology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries culminating in its appropriation by commercial brands; and bringing logos back into the art world, where they originated last century.
The series' format pays homage to the Russian Suprematists, particularly evoking the early monochromes of Kazimir Malevich , fundamental in breaking away from figurative or representative art, who opted for the "supremacy" of geometric form and color. Russian Suprematism also came to represent the social changes of the Russian Revolution, marking a break with the old world and its art. However, although monochrome has its roots in the revolution, that identity was lost throughout the century. The Bauhaus school marked this transition where colors and abstract geometric shapes began to be applied to design and, eventually, to the creation of brand logos. Although the logos themselves reveal this appropriation of art—and color specifically—by the commercial world, the monochromatic format chosen by Cristina Lucas reminds us that the process originated with a revolutionary act.
Cristina Lucas, Red Monochrome, 2016. Image courtesy of Cristina Lucas
This series, in turn, explores the evolution of color psychology, drawing on the theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the emotions he associated with each color. However, beginning in the 20th century, these emotional connotations were also used and manipulated by brands to encourage the public to buy their products. In this series, Lucas has chosen adjectives associated with each color, either based on Goethe's 19th-century texts or by brands seeking to evoke certain experiences to promote consumption, placing them within the framework of each work. Blending adjectives from both sources stimulates reflection on the use of color psychology in our current society and reveals how brands and their economic interests shape our reality, teaching new meanings for colors without us realizing it. Finally, with a touch of irony, Lucas's series leverages color psychology and logos themselves once again, this time restoring them to their purely artistic origins. Just as brands captured the power of color, moving away from their artistic proposal and using it to sell, here Lucas takes up logos and isolates them from their marketing function , returning their colors and geometric shapes once again to the world of art and to a purely artistic role.
Cristina Lucas, Dark Cube installation, 2016. Image courtesy of Cristina Lucas
Walid Raad, the war conflict through color
Similarly, in Lebanese conceptual artist Walid Raad’s series Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped , color occupies a place between abstraction and the literal to reveal the gruesome reality of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Raad (Lebanon, 1967), who currently works in New York, frequently toys with the creation of historical narratives, sometimes claiming to have found information in “archives” when he is in fact his own invention, or creating improbable narratives to explain away the existence of a given document or photo. The series is part of a fifteen-year (1989–2004) art project titled The Atlas Group . To this end, Raad collected historical material, documents, and photos , sometimes editing them and sometimes recontextualizing them, before “donating” them to the Atlas Group archive—the whole thing itself, in fact, an invention of the artist’s own. Weaving a web of artifice and reality to provoke reflection on historical narratives, in Let's Be Honest, Raad takes photographs of Lebanese building facades or landscapes and covers them with seemingly randomly placed colored dots of various sizes—sometimes in different shades of the same color, sometimes in contrasting colors, and sometimes in black and white. However, while at first glance they appear random, the colors and their placement actually have a very specific meaning: they correspond to the positions of bullet holes in the buildings and objects depicted in the photographs and the colors of the cartridge tips that pierced them.
Walid Raad, Let's be honest, the weather helped, 1998. Courtesy of Walid Raad
In the accompanying text, which may or may not be the artist's own invention, Raad explains that as a child, he played around collecting bullets he found on the streets and on building facades, taking photos and jotting them down in notebooks. In particular, the artist became fascinated by the vivid rainbow of colors he found on the bullet tips. According to the text, decades later, he understood that the colors, far from being arbitrary, revealed the bullets' manufacturers and their countries of origin. Since then, Raad has been able to identify seventeen countries and organizations that contributed weapons to the militias taking part in the Lebanese Civil War : Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Libya, NATO, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela. While the origin story of the images may or may not be true, here the artist uses color to reveal a concrete historical truth: that of foreign involvement in a civil war and the horrific connection between the war trade and its tangible consequences on the ground. Depicting bullet holes imported from distant countries—in many cases seemingly unconnected to the Lebanese context—riddled through apartment blocks, cars, and trees, highlights the very real effects of the arms trade on civilian populations, something often ignored in official discourse about wars. As in Cristina Lucas's works, Walid Raad uses color to communicate a complex story in a direct and visually engaging way, taking the meaning that colors have acquired in this specific context to reveal the human cost of war and condemn the political and economic systems that promote it.
1. Walid Raad, Let's be honest, the weather helped, 1998. Courtesy of Walid Raad
2. Walid Raad, Let's be honest, the weather helped, 1998. Courtesy of Walid Raad
Although Cristina Lucas and Walid Raad present diverse practices and techniques, a common thread runs through the artists' works: an understanding that color is not innocent and can be used to communicate complex narratives and tell entire stories in a succinct and impactful way. While both artists' works employ color with an artistic and visual sense, the series derive their importance and relevance from their conceptual power, achieved through masterfully harnessing the political, emotional, historical, and cultural implications of color.
