"I post a letter to you, dear reader, in a red Italian envelope in the little red pillar box at the end of the garden, and watch the postman collect it at four pm in his red van. Italian business envelopes are always red. URGENT, they say. Our brown ones sneak in unnoticed.
I wrote this book in an absence of time. If I have overlooked something you hold precious - write it in the margin. I write all over my books, as markers fall out. I had to write quickly as my right eye was put out in August by the "sight oh! megalo virus" ... and then it was a run- in with the dark. And dark always comes after light. I wrote the red on a hospital drip, and dedicate it to the doctors and nurses at Bart`s. Most of it was written at four in the morning, scrawled almost incoherently in the dark until sleep blissfully overtook me. I know that my colours are not your colours. Two colours are never the same, even if they ́re from the same tube. Context changes the way we perceive them. I`ve usually used one word to describe a colour, so red remains red with lapses into vermilion or carmine. I`ve placed no colour photos in this book, as that would be a futile attempt to imprison them. How could I be certain that the shade I wanted could be reproduced by the printer? I prefer that the colours should float and take flight in your minds." Derek Jarman ”On Seeing Red”, CHROMA
For the group exhbition CHROMA I Volt presents new works by Polish artist Monika Zawadzki, Bergen-based artists Knud Young Lunde and Linda Rogn, and the authors Cesilie Holck and Øyvind Ådland.
The CHROMA project is inspired by the British filmmaker, artist and writer Derek Jarman’s Chroma – a book of Colour (1993). Jarman worked and experimented with a range of different media including film, image, text, diary, collage and gardening. His book Chroma consists of 19 essays on the primary hues as well as white, black, grey, silver, gold, shadow, light and transparency, and presents a mix of observations, quotations, and meditations relating to life and colour.
For the exhibition CHROMA I the five contributors were each given a title, which would serve as inspiration for a new work: SILVER, RED, SHADOW, BLACK, and TRANSLUCENCE.
