Color Play #114

In his latest series of 60 prints, DeSutter deepens his inquiry into the nature of color by shifting his focus to the relationships between hues, how they interact, and the new dimensions they create when viewed in combination. With this expansive collection, DeSutter invites the viewer to engage with the work on multiple levels. Each print stands alone, an individual exploration of color theory and expression, yet the true alchemy occurs when they are viewed as part of a larger, evolving set.

By releasing 60 works, DeSutter encourages the audience to experiment—pairing prints together, exploring contrasts, and discovering how the interplay of complementary or contrasting colors shifts the context of each piece. What begins as a solitary exploration becomes a dynamic, fluid conversation between prints, where meaning is neither fixed nor static, but emerges through the viewer’s own curatorial eye. There’s a kind of egalitarian elegance at play here—an invitation to rethink the boundaries of art as singular or static, and instead to approach it as an ever-changing dialogue, as mutable and alive as color itself.

DeSutter on what inspired this series:

"My hope anytime I revisit an exploration is to learn new things that only can be learned from having previous experience with the basics of that thing and this time around I explored colors from different era source materials than previous Color Play explorations. I believed these changes would drastically affect the outcome of the work. Still, it turns out my experience  (or is it my bias?) allows me to find color relationships that create a cohesive body of Color Play works regardless of the year. It may be a little late to assign new meaning to these pieces, but I’d like to think that it’s more that I’m uncovering the meaning on my third revisit. Each of these works brings focus to individual clippings like the ones I use to create longer, larger movement pieces, and those movement pieces I’ve always understood to represent a period of time/life. When I connect these thoughts I have begun to think of each of these Color Play pieces as a moment in time, an individual memory. I think that’s why each has a unique quality about it, but also fits together with other pieces in the series to show how colorful our lives are. I have a habit of “taking a memory for a walk.” Something during my day will trigger a memory that I think would be fun to explore. Sometimes I park that memory and try to retrieve it during my morning walk. I give it a little more room to breathe and see what other memories come to mind. Giving a memory this much space has actually led to me remember other things I had long since “forgotten.”