Colors have no inherent meanings, but through popular use and their adoption by governments, religious entities, and brands, in many cases they have acquired extremely strong connotations, serving to communicate national, political, business, and cultural values without the need to resort to words.
This weight of meaning is paradoxically both universal and subjective: colors that communicate certain values in one context do not necessarily retain the same meaning in another. Contemporary artists, especially those working with conceptual or abstract art, frequently use color and its connotations to convey ideas to the viewer or to imbue an existing image with new meaning, without resorting to figuration.
Cristina Lucas and Walid Raad are examples of artists who have recognized the powerful communicative capacity of color. Although they have very different aesthetic visions and employ disparate techniques, they share an understanding that color is not something "innocent," devoid of symbolic or ideological weight. On the contrary, these artists leverage the links between color and its representational 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 Monochromes (2016), the 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 dynamics at play in our society, revealing their effects on us and the environment. Here, and in her parallel series Bichromes, the artist uses superimposed brand logos to create works that, from a distance, appear abstract and devoid of references to the real world, when in reality the works have several layers of meaning: 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 in the last century.
The series' format pays homage to the Russian Suprematists, particularly evoking Kazimir Malevich 's early monochrome works, which were fundamental in breaking with figurative or representational art. These artists 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 gradually lost throughout the century. The Bauhaus school marked this transition, where colors and abstract geometric forms began to be applied to design and, eventually, to the creation of brand logos. While the logos themselves reveal this appropriation of art—and color specifically—by the commercial world, Cristina Lucas's choice of a monochromatic format reminds us that the process originated with a revolutionary act.
Cristina Lucas, Red Monochrome, 2016. Image courtesy of Cristina Lucas
This series explores the evolution of color psychology, starting with 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 on the brands that seek to evoke certain experiences to promote consumption, placing them within the context of each artwork. Mixing 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 even realizing it. Finally, with a touch of irony, Lucas's series reuses color psychology and logos themselves, this time to restore them to their purely artistic origins. Just as brands captured the power of color, moving away from its artistic purpose and using it to sell, here Lucas takes logos and isolates them from their marketing function , returning their colors and geometric shapes to the world of art and a purely artistic role.
Cristina Lucas, Dark Cube installation, 2016. Image courtesy of Cristina Lucas
Walid Raad, the war conflict through color
Similarly, in the series Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped , by Lebanese conceptual artist Walid Raad , color occupies a space between abstraction and literalness to reveal the chilling reality of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Raad (Lebanon, 1967), who currently works in New York, frequently plays with the creation of historical narratives, sometimes claiming to have found information in “archives” when in reality they are his own inventions, or creating improbable stories to explain the existence of a real document or photograph. The series is part of an art project that lasted fifteen years (1989-2004) entitled The Atlas Group . For this project, Raad collected historical material, documents, and photographs , which in some cases he edited and in others he recontextualized, before “donating” everything to the Atlas Group archive—which was, in reality, an invention of the artist. 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 random colored dots of varying sizes—sometimes different shades of the same color, sometimes contrasting colors, and sometimes black and white. However, although they appear random at first glance, the colors and their placements 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
SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY
In the text accompanying the photo series, which may or may not be the artist's own invention, Raad explains that as a child he used to collect bullets he found in the streets and on building facades, taking photos and recording everything in notebooks. He was particularly fascinated by the rainbow of vivid colors he found on the bullet tips. According to the text, decades later he understood that the colors, far from being arbitrary, revealed the bullet manufacturers and their countries of origin. Since then, Raad has been able to identify seventeen countries and organizations that contributed weapons to the militias that took 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 story behind the images may or may not be true, here the artist uses color to reveal a concrete historical truth: foreign involvement in a civil war and the horrific link between the arms trade and its tangible consequences on the ground. Depicting bullet holes from weapons imported from distant countries—in many cases seemingly with no direct connection to the Lebanese context—riddled apartment blocks, cars, and trees highlights the real effects of the arms trade on civilian populations, something often ignored in official war narratives. As in the works of Cristina Lucas, Walid Raad uses color to communicate a complex story in a direct and visually compelling way, taking the significance 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 SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY
2. Walid Raad, Let's be honest, the weather helped, 1998. Courtesy of SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY
Although Cristina Lucas and Walid Raad employ diverse practices and techniques, a common thread runs through their work: an understanding that color is not neutral and can be used to communicate complex narratives and tell entire stories succinctly and impactfully. While both artists apply color with an artistic and visual sensibility, their series derive their importance and relevance from their conceptual power, achieved through masterful harnessing of color's political, emotional, historical, and cultural weight.
