• Yves : peintures

Exhibition, 15 Oct 1955 - 15 Oct 1955

Yves : peintures

Éditions Lacoste - Club des Solitaires, Paris, France

From 1955, Yves Klein produces monochrome paintings of various colors, similar to those he had delivered, in advance, in his booklet Yves Peintures (1954).


"After passing through several periods, my pursuits have led me to the creation of uniformly monochrome paintings.
Using multiple techniques, after appropriate preparation of the foundation, each of my canvases is thus covered by one or more layers of a unique and uniform color. No drawing and no variation of hue appear: there is only strictly UNIFORM color. In such manner, the dominant force asserts itself upon the entire painting.
I thus seek to individualize color, for I have reached the conclusion that each color expresses a living world and I express these worlds in my painting. My paintings affirm the idea of absolute unity in the context of perfect serenity, an abstract concept represented in an abstract manner, which causes me to be associated with abstract painters. I right away notice that abstract painters, for their part, do not share my point of view and reproach me for, among other things, refusing to juxtapose colors and provoke relationships among them.
I think, for example, that the color yellow is quite sufficient in and of itself to render an atmosphere and a climate beyond what can be apprehended by thought; moreover, the nuances of yellow are infinite, which makes it possible to interpret it in many ways.
For me, each nuance of a color is, in some way, an individual, a being that is of the same race as the basic color but clearly possesses a unique character and a distinct, personal soul.
There are nuances that are gentle, mad, violent, majestic, vulgar, calm, etc. In short, each color nuance is clearly a presence, a living being, an active force that is born and that dies after living a kind of drama in the life of colors."
Yves Klein, text for the exhibition “Yves Peintures” at the Club des Solitaires, Éditions Lacoste, Paris, 15 october 1955, p. 33

His first solo exhibition takes place at the Club des Solitaires. It is there that he meets Pierre Restany, then a young art critic.