Arthur Fouray #aaafff

#AAAFFF

Each #aaafff painting holds an object inside its frame. You face a monochrome, and its title names what is behind it. Looking more closely will not close the distance between the two. The series began in 2014, on frames I had built in 2013, and every work in it has followed the same loop, which I called its theoretical basis: a canvas and a colour, then an invisible object, then a label.

The hexadecimal code #aaafff holds my initials, A and F. I mix the colour by eye from a screen, with fluorescent pink, cobalt blue and titanium white, so the code stays exact while the paint varies from one surface to the next. In April 2015 I meant to sign every piece with it: a print of my right index finger dipped in #aaafff.

Blackout fabric blocks the light. Stretched like a canvas over a found object, or wrapped round it, it gives the object a painted front. In 2014 I wrote that the series reverses classical mysticism, to make a mystery that is concrete and physical.

Rectangles and tondos take their depth from what they contain: towels in STUDIO MODERNES, an ashtray in Cendrier, an ostrich-feather duster in autruche, a toy shark truck in CAR, whose frame dates from 2013 and whose canvas I restretched in 2017. Titles, dimensions and material lists give clues; none of them shows the object. One canvas was opened in 2015 and gave back a replica Star Wars medal; another held L’invention de Morel. The rest stay closed, and the label remains the place where an unseen thing is made public.

From one work to the next the colour’s code stays the same and the object changes. I keep the object; its image belongs to whoever imagines it.