In total opposition to Tony Cragg's works where the accumulations of colored urban debris are simply treated and arranged on a reductive formal level that only refers to the visual composition and are conventional decorative results, instead of evacuating all of the objects' original meaning and symbolic function, on the contrary, I want to clear this prejudice and question the choice of colors in general social organization, expose the media existence of colors, their status quo, to conjure up the ghosts and the stereotypes (raceós, nations, religions, morals...). What is the connection between the yellow star and the yellow jersey? Between the white of innocence and political white-wash?, the blue moon and feeling blue, Santa Claus's red and communist red...

What happens when we produce the scenario of homogeneity, of unitary thought, of the purified territory that is honest and radical? The demonstration of an unparasitized blatant harmony, pure in appearance, seduces us by its beauty, its harmony, its coherence, its elegance, its artificial, affirmed and established order.

A world that is classified, itemized, catalogued and formal according to the logic of a one-sided and determined point of view, a color. To impose one's conviction, one's truth and improve the idea of the slum belt and the ghetto. Evident metaphors of nationalist, fundamentalist and totalitarian ideologies are then induced. The result works plastically and it is scary. What is this fascination that we experience? From this apparent beauty brews the ómost frightening ...

Otherwise, does the heterogeneity of the unified elements held together by the cover of a single color suppose that this established order comes from chaos? Must we reach this apparent order rather than let pluralities spread, cross, mix and combine in disorder? And by what unifying consensus, for what monochrome neutrality should the divergences of hybrid and rainbow-colored realities be made formal?

Are the monochrome and pure color the outcome of a fanatical utopia and a sublimation of a universal homogenous world, or do they state fragmentary multiplicity compressed and unified into a globalizing and perceptive appearance?

From Rodchenko's pure yellow / pure red / pure blue to Kieslowski's red / blue / white, are we all stricken with cultural color-blindness? The codes and scale of representation never being equivalent from one culture to the next, if color really fluctuates, the impression of colors, their confusion, can produce a serious leveling out operating at conîtaminating uniformitarian conductive states.

At what moment can we discern that color is the medium or that color is the message?

Is it possible to have the same delight and the same confusion while experiencing Matisse's red, Peter greenaway's red in "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover", red lipstick, Marxist red, or the red of a stop sign?

Bertrand Lavier has put his finger on the ambiguity of one of these phenomena by painting two monochromes geranium red of different brands.

The seduction and the delight of bright colors that make up the cheerful charm and the comfort of expressiveness of our daily existence (a certain concept of life through rose-colored glasses, sic!) should not overshadow their hierarchical tensions and their ideological signifiers. It is especially no coincidence if the nazi totalitarian regime had appropriated colors to itemize and classify the specific zones of the concentration camps by identifying groups with colored triangles: green triangles for common law criminals, black triangles for social misfits, blue triangles for expatriates, red triangles for political prisoners, pink triangles for homosexuals, yellow triangles for Jews...

If Marcel Duchamp claims that the verbality of colors justifies the vagueness of the titles of his pieces, in the current dullness can color have new meanings or is color only really a cover (camouflage, make-up, dissimulation). What can be said of the artificial white of Michael Jackson's skin?

Does color point to color?

I inaugurated this new work "épidemik" on March 26, 1996 at the Ferme du Buisson and on the Internet by presenting my color bank project (data bank and Stock Market structure fiction).

December, 1995. Joël Hubaut.