Five to three
Pieter Paul Pothoven
(2016)
Colours can be endlessly reproduced on a screen. Red, green and blue light (RGB): every colour can be made using these. It is difficult to imagine that, in the pre-industrial era, colours were inextricably linked to specific substances that were often rare. What is the relationship between the digital, immaterial RGB colour system and the raw materials that were once used to manufacture colour, such as rocks from underground mines?
The installation 'Five to three' projects slices of stone above one another that served as pigment either crushed or in purified form: cinnabar, chrysocolla, lapis lazuli. Ideally, together pure red, green and blue light form white, but five to three uses these colours in their raw, impure form. Due to these material imperfections, the overlapping colours barely fulfil the RGB laws of light. This results in an abstract landscape with both art historical and geological references.
Supported by the geotechnical laboratory of the VU University in Amsterdam