The colour paintings created by Claudia Desgranges in the past few years use aluminium as their base. For the artist, the metal provides a neutral ground that does not absorb the colour but rather, as it were, into the room. Unlike a canvas or a paper ground into which the colour would penetrate and to which it would firmly stick, it does not form a bond with it. This distance creating quality of the metal combines with its colourless surface quality that, by reflecting the surroundings, seems to be every colour or none at the same time, provoking a tension curve of before and behind, earlier and later, colour and reflection, and keeps on reconstituting itself. It is the room itself that identifies with the colour and is made more concrete through it.

After applying the paint to areas of the aluminium, the artist then, in a second step, blurs them in a time impulse, with the effect of appearing like a flow of perceptions and as a visual, dynamic experience of the colour spectrum. This specific transience of the colour on its base, the aluminium, lends it a special presence in the room, released, as it were, from the surface of the painting and manifesting itself in a gleaming space in front of the wall. The colours are freed from their absolute predetermination through the mirroring, reflections and changes, and through light and shadow, and find themselves in a constant state of change. In so doing, we observe both an approach towards the colours of the surrounding and towards the seemingly „negative colour“ of the metal surface. Contrasts and apparent opposites constantly form a bond. The different „temperatures“ of the colours manifest themselves especially, enabling us to participate in alternating hot and cold experiences of colour.

This transience and quality of colour is kept in suspense, in turn, gives it the special characteristic of producing itself in ever new ways depending on the conditions of the room it finds itself in. Thus, in the context of their exhibitions, the effect of these paintings by Claudia Desgranges changes with the room and the architecture they are in and convey colour as a transient and yet at the same time lasting impression that we can visually perceive. The change of daylight, the change of our viewpoint, and the different interplay of the colour values now and then causes some of her works to present a haze of colours that surrounds the actual base of the paintings, thus, as it were, allowing the picture to be manifested in the room. Our experience of the paintings of this artist is that of pictures shooting past us and we are tempted, almost breathlessly, to try and seize the individual objects in them.

By producing her paintings in long formats in the recent past, Claudia Desgranges has managed to make us aware of a part of a colour reality that makes the infinity of colour comprehensible. These „time cycles“ to which Claudia Desgranges has subjected her colour compositions here are at times like the spectrums that we know from natural science. In the context of these laboratory applications, the colours of the spectrum show different values and dimensional ratios, merge with each other, are mutually dependent while at the same time limiting each other, and reveal the different meanings of quantities, components, and ingredients, each of which are hidden in the product to be explored. Even in her pictorial inventions, Claudia Desgranges examines in a scientific manner the effects of colours in their interplay with each other and their ability to communicate with us.

Using a colour chromatographic technique, she dissects the perception of the colour spectrum in new variations and values, and places them on the aluminium base which, due to its smooth surface, gives the colours a maximum of freedom since they cannot penetrate into it and thus gain their own, independent materiality. It is particularly in the multitude of the colour compositions in the long bands of colour that the partiality and the aspect of infinity of the colour is manifested.
Here, in these frieze paintings as much as in the square plates in which the colour is engaged in a clearly more limited form in an interplay of two or a maximum of three colours, she develops a fluctuating colour ensemble through overlaying and transparencies, intensified by the aluminium as the base material, that predetermines a colour code that we are required to decode, but may not be able to. This coding of colours implies a level of meaning behind the colour itself that the artist has visualised in its infinity.

Dr. Gabriele Uelsberg, LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn