Press Release - Robert Swain 6x6 Color Grid Paintings
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, 6x6 Color Grid Paintings, by Robert Swain in his seventh solo exhibition with the Gallery. This presentation includes 7 new and recent acrylic paintings, each 6 foot-square in Swain’s iconic grid compositions and furthering his career-long characterization of colors using his own system of categorization as he explores the interaction between colors and their effect on human visual perception.
The focus for each of Swain’s compositions is solely on the colors: their adjacency to each other, interaction with one another, and the resulting effect on the viewer’s perception of color. Therefore, the colors are the content and subject of each painting. This statement is meant to distinguish the actual content (the colors) from the grid in each composition. The grid is the structure, or architecture, of each painting that contains distinct colors in individual squares that each measure 12 x 12 inches in size. This last clarification also makes an important point, each square contains only one homogeneous color which is critical for the viewer to perceive and understand the significance of what they see, both in their eye and mind.
Swain continues his formal approach using of the square as his compositional element of choice for characterizing over 5,000 colors, including their values and degrees of saturation. But, more specifically, he uses the elemental square and resulting grid compositions to elucidate the color blending between adjacent hues that observers experience while viewing his iconic paintings. Swain’s artwork and life-long project is studying the human response to color. His paintings are much more than grids of color, they represent 50 years of systemic studies of how color and color juxtapositions affect the way human’s view color and the corresponding effects on the human psyche.
Swain’s paintings demonstrate that the human eye will start to blend adjacent colors in certain ways such that the viewer sees a harmonization (mixing) of the colors or an entirely new color. It is quite remarkable, and viewers can experience this phenomenon even with digital images if they can concentrate on their monitor with minimal glare and distraction. Seeing Swain’s paintingsin person is spectacular and almost mind-blowing because the viewer becomes part of the process and result. The viewer will see new faint bands of color appear that are mixtures of the squares of color from the left or right, or top or bottom of the painting; often, the blending is happening and visible in multiple directions simultaneously. These bands of blended colors will shift in different orientations and directions with different compositions and organizations of the color as well as the viewer’s distance and angle of position relative to the painting.
Artist Statement: Color as Content in Painting
“French painters, he would continue, may have seen a rainbow. Nature may have given them some taste for nuance, some sense of color. But I have revealed to you the great and true principles of art. I say of art! of all the arts, gentlemen, and of all the sciences. The analysis of colors, the calculation of prismatic refractions, give you the only exact relations in nature, the rule of all relations. And everything in the universe is nothing but relations. Thus one knows everything when one knows how to paint; one knows everything when one knows how to match colors.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
from The Essay on the Origin of Languages
Color is a form of energy derived from the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulates our perceptual processes and is instrumental in conveying emotions. In some instances, color is culturally encoded, projecting content through symbolism or associations. The origin for such references are found in the way that the energy (wavelengths), from a particular color, generates feeling; a physiological change produced by the wavelength (energy), of a particular color or colors. The energy which emanates from green is distinctly different from the wavelengths that define red. In some cultures, pure red is associated with danger. Feelings and attitudes created by the aggressive, radiate energy, which is unique to the red part of the spectrum. When pure red is altered, its emotional attributes change, as in the stability associated with red earth colors, or the whimsical fluctuation produced by pink. In this sense, color transmits feeling(s) through the perception of energy (wavelengths) from the electromagnetic spectrum. Freed from cultural restraints, red can be experienced by itself as a phenomenon, which possesses substantial content. When red is placed next to green, the contrast is heightened, as M. E. Chevreul has observed, and the experience resides in the energy generated by the convergence of these unique spectral wavelengths.
Robert Swain
Source Link: More informationAssociated Artist
Associated Exhibitions
- Robert Swain 6x6 Color Grid Paintings
March 30, 2025 - April 30, 2025
MORE INFO
Associated News
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March 30, 2025
Press Release - Robert Swain 6x6 Color Grid Paintings -
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June 6, 2014
At Bergamot Station: Great paintingsfor every taste
Huffington Post, 06/05/2014
John Seed
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June 6, 2014
Robert Swain presents "Color as a Transfer of Energy -
May 22, 2014
Culture Watch: Looking forward
Santa Monica Daily Press, 05/22/2014
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May 18, 2014
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Yareah Magazine, 05/18/2014
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May 14, 2012
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Eyes In, 05/14/2012
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May 11, 2012
Press Release - Robert Swain "Color Affect"