The Colour Out Of Space

Özlem Altın, Claire Chesnier, Pablo Dàvila, Elif Erkan, Jean-Charles Eustache, Leylâ Gediz, Eva Nielsen, Elsa Sahal

26 juin - 27 juillet

THE PILL ®, Istanbul

Curator : Jean-Charles Vergne

« The color, which resembled some of the bands of the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they named it a color after all. » H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space, 1927. 

In his famous short story, The Colour Out of Space, published in 1927, American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft describes the extraordinary phenomena that occurred on an isolated farm in 1882. A white cloud at high noon, a series of explosions in the air, precede the fall of a meteorite that reveals at its heart an unknown colour, impossible to define. Unnameable. The stone from the farthest reaches of outer space inexplicably contracts in its crater, transforms itself, attracts lightning. The flora becomes luxuriant before turning corrupt and crumbling into a grayish powder. Beasts and men suffer the influence of this inexpressible colour which, in a few months, inexorably transforms the landscape into a « lightning land » before suddenly propelling itself into the firmament to disappear forever, leaving behind a desolation similar to that of valleys whose tones have been undermined by the ashes of a volcanic explosion.

In the novella, color is, in the most literal sense, « the place where our brain and the universe meet », as Paul Cézanne said, underlining the deeply moving intimacy between colour and the eye. Beyond its fantastic register, The Colour Out of Space is the story of an encounter between a chromatic precipitate projected from the universe’s diffuse horizon and its fascinated, unthinkable - and ultimately cataclysmic - perception by those it touches, irreparably altering them. The title of the short story captures the ambivalence of this unholy hue exhaled from the heart of the meteorite: it falls from interstellar space, but at the same time, it is out of space. It creates space in an impalpable power, the extent of which the eye can measure, but which words cannot grasp, except in an approximate way. Colour is always stronger than language. Encountering a colour is an event in itself - we’ve all experienced it, fascinated by the dusky purple of a sky, the soft green of a meadow or the elusive iridescent modulation of a gaze. This event, staggering in its emergence, is nonetheless impossible to grasp. By establishing formal links and spatial connections between the works, this exhibition crosses the major themes of Lovecraft’s short story - unnameable colors, cosmic and earthly spaces, metamorphosis and regeneration.

Claire Chesnier’s auroral projections, Pablo Davilà’s particle circumvolutions and obsidian eclipse, Jean-Charles Eustache’s celestial colors and Eva Nielsen’s fiery skies form a constellation of atmospheres that responds to the organic, vital or material metamorphoses of Elsa Sahal, Özlem Altın, Leylâ Gediz and Elif Erkan in a movement of transformation and regeneration of forms.

Jean-Charles Vergne