Peinture de feu couleur (FC 15)

‘My goal is twofold: first of all, to register the trace of human sentimentality in present-day civilization; secondly, to register the trace of fire which has engendered this very same civilization. And this because the void has always been my constant preoccupation; and I hold that in the heart of the void as well as in the heart of man, fires are burning’ (Y. Klein, ‘Chelsea Hotel Manifesto’, in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, New York 2007, pp. 195-196).

‘The baroque vision marks the apocalyptic conclusion of the line of fire. With the approach of his death, Yves the Monochrome exorcises infernal reality in the many-colored effervescence of the fiery language’ (P. Restany, Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York 2005, p. 56).

Propelled over the surface of the painting like deep sea creatures plunging through the depths of the ocean, the combustion of Yves Klein’s signature IKB pigment under fame in FC 15 is a material record of the artist’s pursuit of the immaterial. With its burnished, fame-licked surface and dramatic, tenebrous composition, FC 15 is one of no more than a dozen of Klein’s fire colour paintings described by his friend and collaborator, the critic Pierre Restany, as the ‘baroque fire colour paintings’. Distinguished by their ‘gestural fury, the stridency of tones, their vital exuberance’, the ‘baroque’ works occupy a unique position within the consummate series of fire colour paintings that constitute the aesthetic culmination of Klein’s entire artistic practice (P. Restany, Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York 2005, p. 55). Mirroring the baroque colour palette, through its shimmering gilded surface, the diffusion of IKB over the charred and blackened cardboard reflects the ornate gold, azurite and indigo chromatic scheme that dominated seventeenth century painting. Describing the biomorphic composition of FC 15, with its trailing tails of dripped, concentrated pigment, Restany wrote of ‘the jets of blue, red-orange, or pink, fixed by dazzling oscillations of the fire, take on the form of extravagant mollusks, mysterious, floating jellyfsh in search of their prey (Peintures de feu coleur FC 9, FC 28, FC 29) or heavy, giant octopi with strong, nervous hairy tentacles (Peintures de feu coleur FC 3, FC 4, FC 15, FC 30, FC 32)’ (P. Restany, Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York 2005, p. 55). Using the material trace of fire as a record of the immaterial concepts that drove Klein’s creative actions, FC 15 is a fire-born invocation of the artist’s lifelong ambition to become one with the immaterial Void. Created in the final year of his life, FC 15 represents the final step towards Klein’s sublimatory shift from the material to spiritual, transforming fire’s natural destructive properties into a source of creative potential. As Restany declared, ‘the baroque vision marks the apocalyptic conclusion of the line of fire. With the approach of his death, Yves the Monochrome exorcises infernal reality in the many-colored effervescence of the fiery language’ (P. Restany, Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York 2005, p. 56).

The genesis of Klein’s remarkable fire colour paintings came via the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer (Monochrome and Fire), at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld in early 1961 where his Fire Fountains and Wall of Fire were first presented. These works comprised of blue flames burning vertically and a rectangular wall of flame created with a sequence of carefully positioned Bunsen burners. Theatrically illuminating the museum’s gardens at twilight, Klein, in an apparent moment of revelation, recognised the potential for accessing the immaterial through the elemental potency of fire. Between March and July of 1961 Klein continued to develop his fire paintings at the testing centre of Gaz de France, located just outside Paris in Plaine Saint-Denis, where he used the vast flames provided by the experimental laboratories’ giant coke gas burners to burn and transform the surface of these paintings. Treating the surface of his cardboard canvas with water Klein was able to create the distinctive pictorial effects that characterise his fire colour paintings, those compositional voids and linear drippings that yield their vital otherworldly quality. The very particular morphology of FC 15 and the ‘baroque’ grouping was created by the rapid manipulation by fire of fresh IKB pigment with swift vertical and horizontal movements of the burner. Giving material form to the omnipresence of the immaterial void in this way articulated what Klein himself described as ‘the presence of absence’ (Y. Klein, quoted in P. Restany, Yves Klein, New York 1985, p. 210). Discussing the central importance of fire to his practice in his Chelsea Hotel Manifesto of 1961 Klein wrote, ‘my goal is twofold: first of all, to register the trace of human sentimentality in present-day civilization; secondly, to register the trace of fire which has engendered this very same civilization. And this because the void has always been my constant preoccupation; and I hold that in the heart of the void as well as in the heart of man, fires are burning’ (Y. Klein, ‘Chelsea Hotel Manifesto’ in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, New York 2007, pp. 195-196).