Yves Klein Quotes

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces? Because every work of creation, quite apart from its cosmic position, is the representation of pure phenomenology – every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate.

The glaring obviousness of my paternity of monochromy in the twentieth century is such that even if I myself were to fight hard against that fact I should probably never manage to rid myself of it.

Through all these researches into an art that would lead to immaterialisation, Werner Ruhnau [German architect] and I came together in the architecture of the air. He was hindered by the last obstacle that even a w:Mies van der Rohe [also a German architect, famous for his reflecting glass skyscrapers in the U.S.] hadn’t been able to overcome: the roof, the screen that separates us from the sky, from the blue sky. And I was hindered by the screen that the tangible blue on the canvas constitutes, which deprives man of a constant vision of the horizon.

In 1946, when I was still an adolescent, I went and signed my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic 'realistico-imaginary' voyage.

..the thinking man is no longer the center of the universe, but the universe is the center of the man [referring to collaborations between artists, in which Klein was involved several times]. We shall then know 'prestige' in comparison to the 'vertigo' of before. Thus we shall become men of the air, we shall know the upward force of attraction, towards space, towards nowhere and everywhere at once; having thus mastered the earthly force of attraction we shall literally levitate in complete physical and spiritual freedom.

At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.

De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 106

I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!. ..the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.. .A space of blue sensibility within the frame of the white walls of the gallery.

I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the left-overs from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor.

This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.

At the Galerie Colette Allendy I exhibited some twenty monochrome surfaces, all in different colours: greens, reds, yellows, purples, blues, oranges.. ..and so found myself at the start of my career in this style.. .I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue', that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.

The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' – that was what I needed.

De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 107