Sea

pastel on paper
24 × 34 cm

In the 1998 painting “Sea” I employed a tautological procedure. I define the free depiction of a restless blue surface with the written word Sea. (The blue sea is, next to the sky, the largest blue surface we can observe.) I wrote the word in yellowy-orange. The blue patterning would not strike us as being sea if the word did not identify it. In this procedure, pigment and word help each other out. Colours area harmonised according to the principle of complementary contrast: yellowy orange letters on a blue and white ground produced an impression of glittering, of the kind that the choppy surface of the sea creates on sunny day or at sunset.

(2024; written for the audio guide to the exhibition “NON-BAR-RIER-S” [“NE-PRE-PRE-KE”] in the Typhlological Museum in Zagreb, 2024)