When we’re asked “What do the words “red”, “blue”, “black”, “white” mean” , we can, of course, immediately point to things that have these colors, – but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color
Dedicated to investigating the relationship between reality and language, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) believed, among other things, that since signs represent objects, the logical form of language would be the very form of the world. Parting from the above preamble, this would lead us to think that the name given to color is also color. And it is, indeed, a fundamental part of the color perception we have of “world’s things”, activating and requesting our knowledge, memory and imagination. It is in a debate involving like aspects that Letícia Lampert has been basing her poetry, adopting photography as a means and color as a theme.
In the current work, The Color Scale of Things, Letícia is in a dialog with one of the most popular systems of color standardization, the Pantone Color Chart. Internationally used by printing and publishing houses as well as by ad agencies, it works as a color showcase that indicates in a close and credible way what colors look like once printed.
In its format and apparent use, Letícia’s catalog too seems to allow for color distinction. However, if we observe it closely, we will notice that Letícia’s color catalog are intangible as a means for measurement because they operate in the realm of language, subjectivity and fantasy. Brazilian Portuguese, like most other human languages, has a way to reflect the cultural traits of the people who speak it. How to explain the “panty blue”, the “tomato red”, the “color of meat”, the “color of skin”, which are offered to these speakers? And the color of which human race skin, for instance? What to say of the “color of a donkey that has fled” (namely, an indefinite color)? How could one define it or even imagine it to be? Shown as photographs of details and textures of things their names remind one of, these “colors” reveal, again and again, the incommeasurable nature they have. The “moss green”, perhaps bearing a different tone from its English version, contains dozens of greens, as do the “lemon green” and the “leaf green”. Originated in connections to other things and metaphors of everyday life, these names strengthen the experiential content that lies behind the act of naming and relating to the world. Once isolated from their contexts they may seem absurd – all the more so in their renderings in English, the lingua franca adopted in most color catalogs. It is in such dissonance that the lexicon of colors, immersed in its heavily lyric content, will not lend itself peacefully to translation.
Fact is, the provocative and lively The Color Scale of Things does perturb the mind’s sense of familiarity with reality. This is so perhaps less due to the fact that we know and use the names used by the artist and more because we are made aware of their unlikelihood, if not lack of preciseness.
The same subtle complexity is found in the work The Color Scale of Time, in which the artist sought to once more measure the imponderable by means of color; the imponderable being here time. Both concepts of color and time are by nature abstruse. The idea of measuring one on the basis of the other borders delirium. Within a single frame, namely, the window of her apartment’s bathroom, Letícia photographed light impressions on the corrugated window pane separating her from the landscape, which naturally marks the grading that is so typical of scales. Limiting herself to this cut, during one year she produced dozens of images that embody two color scales: one for sunny days and another for rainy ones, but neither one with an application or function.
It is worth recalling that the artist, whose background is in Design, routinely works with systems like the aforementioned Pantone or the Kodak Color Chart. It is they which lend “truthfulness” to colors, reassuring the area’s professionals in their choices and perceptions. Therefore, when she is into creating not only new and dreamlike measures, such as the color-time and the color-thing, but also ethereal charts, Letícia Lampert invites us to think about the inconsistency of our methods to classify and order the world – thereby also extending the lyricism and poetry proper to the world of art to everyday life.
Paula Ramos
Journalist and Art Critic
Porto Alegre, October 2009