ON COLOUR...

nly those who love colour are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees.
– Johannes Itten

On Colour... draws on the theories of colour harmony that Johannes Itten taught at the Bauhaus, and on the literature of Mazdaznan, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy. It describes how one can, potentially, produce the white cloud of invisibility and documents the author’s own attempts to manifest the cloud. These manifestations have a complex group of antecedents that include Lawrence Weiner’s early spray-painted works, John Latham’s One Second Drawings, Robert Irwin’s luminous disc paintings of the 1960s and representations of the ineffable made by spiritualists and occultists.

Ian Whittlesea is an artist whose work explores the relationships between language, light, image and diagram both on the page and in the world. His translation of Yves Klein’s Les Fondements du Judo was published in 2009, Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture in 2012, Becoming Invisible in 2014 and The Egyptian Postures in 2017. These texts have been collectively described as “instruction manuals for transcendental exercise”.