Exhibition, 2 Dec 2017 - 18 Feb 2018

The day is blue, the silence is green, life is yellow

Museo Experimental el Eco, Mexico City, Mexico

The exhibition’s title comes from a text by Yves Klein written in 1952. This declaration belongs to a collection of poems written in March that year, where Klein tries to define his position in the field of art by exploring the phenomenon of the visible in his work. This phrase—here incomplete—is in a sense the affirmation of the chromatic problem in art as an event and as a territory of action, which would later become a central issue in his work.

The letters exchanged between Mathias Goeritz and Klein in 1960 evince the encounter between these two figures. In light of the moment’s artistic and historic context, they could be interpreted as the complicity and interest of two artists that through different paths and positions reached similar formal solutions at the same time.

In this sense, the project presented in Museo Experimental El Eco seeks to place the emotional architecture program developed here by Goeritz—through which he dealt with the rationalist/functionalist architecture of the international style from a Mexican context and which is also the metaphysical background of his work—in “conversation” with Klein’s immaterial project and his ideas on the monochrome.

This exhibition explores the notion of a field of action in artistic production beyond the historic moment, and situates the chromatic problem as poetic substance for the generation of statements by other artists. As part of this, the IKB (International Klein Blue) is manifested in the space designed by Mathias Goeritz as a curatorial gesture that arranges an environment for the works convened.