Color comes from the material

Every season someone announces the color of the year, and every season I have the same reaction, a mix of curiosity and suspicion. Curiosity because the choices tend to be intelligent. Suspicion because the idea behind them is that color is a catalogue decision.

In my work it is not. Color is not a choice I make beforehand. It is what appears when light meets a material, and my job is to recognize it and stay out of the way.

A red enamel is not red. It is a surface doing something specific with light, letting a little in, holding it, giving it back slower and warmer than it went in. Light it another way and the same red becomes another red, and neither of them is a lie. Glass has no color at all and produces a whole spectrum when light crosses it at a lucky angle, an arc no gradient reproduces honestly because what is happening there is physics, not a gradient. Metal has no color either. It has the color of the room.

I learned this the hard way underwater. At twenty meters you choose nothing. The water has already decided, it ate the red, pushed everything toward blue, and what is left is to understand the rule and work inside it.

That is where the principle I carry came from. Color comes from the material. It is not applied, it is revealed.

There is a practical consequence to that, and it is the reason my brand is gray. If the material supplies the color, everything around it has to keep quiet. It is not minimalism as an aesthetic. It is about not competing with the only color that matters, which is the one happening inside the image.

That is why I have no brand color. The color is not mine. It belongs to the glass, the enamel, the metal and the water.