I started some colours researches in 1959 avoiding colourist; I applied the same technique to the colour and the form. When I was working with colours it wasn’t to achieve a "blue hot" painting etc...I started to use not one colour but all of them. I wanted them to be pure, not spoiled by black and white. I forbid myself to us any colours I didn’t choose from the start. The limited 14 colours seemed to resume all the possible variations of the chromatic mixtures.
Combinations/Mixture
From this scale of 14 colours, I started to make simple mixtures from one or two shades going horizontally, vertically and in diagonal; on top of those 4 shades, I added some covering the entire surface then I added some new shades: 4 of them. Those mixtures born from a simple and strict system were multiple. I was working on small cardboard with gouache and on transparent rhodoid. This last technique allowed me to obtain all kind of permutations. Later I invented a small machine with transparent tapes where all my shades of colours could appear. Switching them, I could have an incredible choice of mixture.
150 years at the time of my calculations to obtain with gouache. All the variations from one single system and with the rhythms of 2 days per gouache, was going to take me 150 years to reach all the combinations.
Quality Fascination
I was impressed of the quantity of the possible changes included in each program. I was keen imagining all the variations succeeding in time and the probabilities were leading me to a new phenomenon: the limitless duration. Each painting which was made with any combinations was a special moment with ever-changing movement and colours.
After that, around end of 1959, I started to imagine mechanisms to bring out all this potential of variations. The real movement, the multiplication of images, the transparency, the colouring, the space, the light, appeared in my research.
All those researches I started 12 years ago have been reviewed, blew up and ordained so they have a more visual form today.
