E.R. - In fact, I wasn't interested in all the intellectual justifications he was trying to put forward. That's what I was trying to demonstrate. Because it seemed to me much more important to go straight to the living source, to the spiritual nature of his art.

P.U. - To experience?

E.R. - Yes, through experience. Experience being something like the purest possible projection of the spirit that animated all his art, and God knows it was then. There was no need for much explanation. You can gloss over it all you like, but Yves Klein's work needs none of that. It's there, and as it is, it's obvious and manifest. This is all the more remarkable given that, at the time, people might have thought that his art was driven by his personality. But it wasn't. Now he's been gone for more than forty years and his art is just as much alive, and speaks directly, despite all the things that can be written about it and which we can do without. And that's very rare. I think, for example, that Arman's work not only stands up better, but is much more in need of this intellectual support, if not explanation; of being linked perhaps to a socio-cultural phenomenon, etc., etc., the transmutation of waste. Arman's work supports this. But Yves Klein's work dœs not. It dœsn't need all that. If you look at the sketches on the architecture of air, you can't help but be amazed. But it's marvellous. You look at a monochrome: ah, it's fantastic. The prints: it's magnificent. It's a work that's there, that imposes itself, that dœsn't need anything else.

extract from an interview with Éliane Radigue by Philippe Ungar, 2007