Substance, Essence, Colour
A solo exhibition by the Belgian artist collective LAb[au], laboratory for art and urbanism.

Colour is never merely colour. An optical phenomenon, a material, an atmosphere, it is also an emotional or cultural sign. It is subjective and objective, measurable, yet its experience can never be fully described or grasped through language. Between substance and essence, a philosophical question emerges: “What is a thing—colour, in this case—and what makes it what it is?”

New materials open up new dimensions of colour. Technologies make signals beyond the visible spectrum perceptible, expanding the scope of what we call colour. Can colour also be invisible? Meanwhile, the announcement of the “colour of the year” makes headlines. Each era thus constructs its own vision of colour.

The works of LAb[au] explore these relationships: from the colour of time to the time of colour, from the language of colour to the colour of language. Between matter and meaning, the visible and the measurable, colour—the very material of painting—becomes the subject of art and calls our contemporary world into question. The pairing of substance and essence thus challenges our conceptions of painting: the monochrome painting becomes an event, and colour becomes a sign of an era—our own.

Nested white rectangles over bands of pink, violet and blue.