PROJET ORANGE 2018
A reflection of success and power, the color orange ...
The color orange is the reflection of success and power, that of a "man sure of his strength" to use Vassili Kandinsky's term.
It was the color of the 1970s, the period that marked the height of the "Thirty Glorious Years" and of the industrial revolution that began two centuries earlier, that allowed the world to experience accelerated and dazzling progress.
In France, this modernity is orange. From the new touch-tone phones to the high-speed train, every symbol of success proudly displays this color.
... is to design what gold was to the icon before the Renaissance
But the color orange is to design what gold was to the icon in the Renaissance.
At the end of the 1970s, a technological revolution began comparable to the long passage between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, when human beings acquired the ability to produce objects using increasingly powerful sources of energy. An invention begins to change the world and ends the age of electromechanics - the storage and then the indefinite, gratuitous reproduction of information.
Pierre Saint Blancat for this reason places the shadows of the actors of this transformation on orange backgrounds that explode - just as the icons exploded at the end of the Middle Ages with the artist's intrusion into the painting, marking the passage to a new artistic and human era.
The contrast between the orange symbol of power and the destruction of that power was staged in 1618 by Diego Velázquez, in his famous painting of a ruined aristocrat cooking an egg (National Gallery, Edinburgh). The origin of the woman can be read on her orange face. Her misery is that of an empire crumbling around her. Spain had discovered America 126 years earlier. During this period, the volume of gold in Europe had increased tenfold. At the height of his power, the income of King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) was higher than that of all European rulers combined. And yet, as early as 1575, Philip II wrote to his advisor Garnica "that he did not see the day before how he would live the next day". The fading orange color was already the mark of a period of transformation.
Pierre Saint Blancat's “Orange” project started in 2018.
