Broken white

The blue tap is for cold water, red is for warm. Orange triggers a sense of excitement. And yellow is good for attracting attention in shop windows. Everyone relates to colours, often in highly emotional ways, but exactly how this works, we don?t know. With designers this leads to chromophobia, a fear of colour, which is repressed with conventions, fashions and styles. The digital revolution has turned the whole thing on its head. For centuries we viewed colour in terms of light hitting an object and reflecting off it in varying degrees. Total reflection results in white, complete absorption in black. But today?s ubiquitous screens are not light reflecting objects. They are objects that emit light themselves. The source of colour has changed, and with that, the way it manifests itself. While he was teaching at Design Academy Eindhoven, artist Mathieu Meijers developed a scheme that allows us to recalibrate our understanding of colour. 'Broken White' is a concretisation of this scheme through works of art and design. On the one hand it contains light, reflecting objects that appeal to our higher emotions, define our identities and encourage a taxonomy ? even to a dangerous degree sometimes. On the other hand there are objects in dark, absorbing colours which evoke feelings of emotional security, but also of fear and which represent earthly connectedness and intuition. The emergence of new techniques and materials has caused not only an increase in the different manifestations of colours, but also in the number of meanings colours can have. 'Broken White' demonstrates how designers and artists are dealing with this and how they are part of creating these meanings.00Exhibition: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (08.10.-06.11.2016).