Although not directly related to our topic of synaesthesia, David Batchelor is a contemporary artist who focusses much of his work around colour, which could be interesting when looking at colour theory and its importance.
David Batchelor (born 1955, Dundee) is a Scottish artist, writer, and a Senior Tutor in Critical Theory in the Department of Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London.
Batchelor is interested in reconsidering colour theories from a contemporary context, which he explores in Chromophobia (2000), a book dedicated to the subject. His dazzlingly saturated objects reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. “I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in ‘pure’ colour or in colour as a transcendental presence… So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence.” (http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/david_batchelor.htm?section_name=shape_of_things)
Chromophobia
Chromophobia (also known as chromatophobian or chrematophobia) is a persistent, irrational fear of, or aversion to, colours and is usually a conditioned response. While actual clinical phobias to color are rare, colors can elicit hormonal responses and psychological reactions.
Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body - usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration." (David Batchelor, excerpt from Chromophobia, London: Reaktion, 2000, p. 22-23.)
Batchelor is interested in reconsidering colour theories from a contemporary context, which he explores in Chromophobia (2000), a book dedicated to the subject. His dazzlingly saturated objects reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. “I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in ‘pure’ colour or in colour as a transcendental presence… So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence.” (http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/david_batchelor.htm?section_name=shape_of_things)
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