Robert Delaunay
The restlessness of simultaneous colour contrasts

 
Abstract:
Robert Delaunay believes the basis of painting is the colours, with their laws and contrasts, their slow and quick vibrations and their intervals. For him, the fundamental aspect in painting is the shifting relationships that can exist between the colours. These relationships underpin Delaunay’s paintings – in a painting style that has moved beyond imitative, into the realms of the imaginative. Delaunay believed that light, perceived in constant movement and transformation, creates its own colour varieties that are independent of any objective content, and that a specific harmony, created by planes of colour moving in contrast, is capable of reproducing these light movements. Movement and depth emerge at the same time, simultaneously, sparked by the concurrent contrast of the colours. For Delaunay, the concurrent contrast is a link between the movement perceived, and the supreme experience of inspiration. Through the experience produced by the colours, the visible surface of the image takes on the depth of a spatial dimension. Concentrated perception of the image also embodies a temporal component, which comes into play the longer the viewer looks at the painting. Delaunay introduced the terms 'vibratio'n and 'dissonance' as descriptive criteria for the choppiness of colours – both have a rhythmic resonance, also an intrinsic element of poetry. Delaunay had in mind a great process: a oneness of art and life, a vital expansion and force in his works, an extension of art into life. His paintings, like light itself, are unfoldings of sight.