Primary Colours

Thinking about colour - according to Cézanne the place where the brain meets the universe - can make you feel pretty old-fashioned. Like abstraction or Modernism, it has become one of those 20th century by-products; important of course, but no longer the kind of thing that wakes you up at dawn, worried about where it's going or what it should do. After all, in its purest incarnation, what is there to understand about it? Surely it just is. Colour doesn't mean anything in itself and only ever alludes to some other generalised kind of perception in some other medium - sound or feeling or flag-waving. But to assume that you really grasp its constituents is at once the dumbest and smartest way to react to its multiplicity - dumb, because closures are ultimately pretty uninteresting and smart because generalisations often open the floodgates to guiltless pleasure. Maybe Cézanne was right - how you read colour depends on what kind of brain you've got and which universe it is you choose to inhabit.

The struggle between colour and meaning has resulted in the best monochrome paintings looking like the calm slick of the ocean after a storm or the blank face of someone who's had to reject something. Gerstner's pictures (a loose description of images forged from such disparate materials as nitrocellulose on phenolic resin plates or wood, and printer's ink or acrylic on aluminium), for all their restraint, hint at the discordance that such restless foundations can engender.

Artists who still explore colour as their primary modus operandi often do it with the fervour of explorers moving into uncharted territory without realising it's had an efficient bus system for years. But when you see the work of someone like Karl Gerstner you realise that there's still stuff out there - seemingly simple combinations of colours and shapes and textures - that can surprise you. The pictures he makes are so startlingly optical that initially you wonder if there's anything lurking beneath their seductive surfaces. Often made over a period of years, they vaguely refer to organic life-forms - flowers, shells, cells, grids - while austerely echoing the kind of colour exercises you did at school. They're intensely stripped back and oddly enigmatic. Unable to give you anything more in the way of information that isn't contained in the sum of their parts, their distilled surfaces vibrate like a victory of the sensual over the rational or conceptual. Nonetheless, if their cool perfection is hard to crack, their overheated cosmic titles, for example Colour Fractal 4.00 Explosion at the Border of the Galaxy (1976/1988-89), are hallucinatorily referential of other universes and language systems. They're so hot and cold about how they want you to react, you feel like you could take their temperature and get a different result every time.

Trying to make something perfect in an imperfect world - or trying to imbue something immaterial with something intensely physical - may be a doomed exercise, but it's something Gerstner, born in Basel, Switzerland in 1930, has been trying to do for over fifty years. Suckled on the legacy of the Bauhaus, he absorbed their social principles without joining any movement or group. Although he trained as a graphic designer, designed new typefaces and has published books on avant-garde cooking, Concrete and Constructivist art, typography and colour theory, his main activity has been that of an artist struggling to find a coherent and non-ego based system of expression in a century dogged by the inconclusive precision of its explorations. His primary exploration - colour - manifests itself in different ways. So far, he has created 12 major groups of work, each of which refers to either the way they're constructed ('Serial Pictures' and 'Cyclic Permutations') or to their associations ('Colour Sounds', 'Times Square', 'Colour Organ'). A 13th group is devoted to unrealised projects: ideas, plans and models for large-scale outdoor environments. But within the parameters of his programmatic mission, Gerstner can't help but respond to his subject with an approach that strains at the bit of Modernist self-control. 'Looking at my pieces' he has said, 'no one has to identify with me.' 1 Perhaps.

In 1959 Yves Klein, answering the question 'why did you choose blue?' quoted Gaston Bachelard describing a poet 'suffering from the irony of blueness'. 2 A very particular strand of irony, it springs from the blue sky (the most accessible place in the world for unlimited reverie) struggling to 'fill the gaping holes wickedly made by birds'. 3 At home in the inarticulate chasm between space and place, colour, built from too many fragments of meaning, has always had a hard time being pure - as if the shape it finds itself in isn't the only possible shape it could ever be. Usually interrupted by, or forced to compete with, often uninvited narratives, the struggle between colour and meaning has resulted in the best monochrome paintings looking like the calm slick of the ocean after a storm or the blank face of someone who's had to reject something. Gerstner's pictures (a loose description of images forged from such disparate materials as nitrocellulose on phenolic resin plates or wood, and printer's ink or acrylic on aluminium), for all their restraint, hint at the discordance that such restless foundations can engender. They play with organic shapes, but are static; dreamy but reserved about which dream they're referring to; unique but resistant to the idea of originality; they're cold, but invite you to plunge inside them and warm yourself up.

The best analyses of any given situation are always touched by something irrational and unexpected. This is Formalism's paradox: Modernist self-purification predicated on a belief that the image - and by association the self - can ignore the context that created it and in the process be stripped back to reveal something less illusionistic and so richer than that which preceded it. It's a position that Gerstner's pictures at once illustrate and negate - emphasising their materiality while staring, mesmerised, at the metaphorical possibilities of the sky.