Tangerine and me

“That is My exhausting search of color” tangerine “, mandarin orange, field ceramic cone to the defined temperature of 10, for those who work the legendary high fire” around 1300 ° C”

Tangerine is an orange dot that for several years I am trying to create in the laboratory, like an alchemist. Ceramic, in the electric furnace is equivalent to a kind of utopia, unless …….. unless they are of the ploy. Tangerine is a color that calls me at certain times, then listen, follow his call and get back to work. As an artist, I am part of a current that is called color field, my inspiration and teacher is Helen Frankenthaler, American painter for whom the term was coined by the critic Clement Greenberg color field. Like you I am part of the black artists. In contemporary art history are so many different ways, one, the most complex and intimate are open is that of color. Before Helen Frankenthaler, Rothko, Nolde, Redon, Turner …. The color way is also the least flashy, dwells in the soul rooms and asks the audience to dance, to go, to speak, to listen. Whoever keeps a picture that is the color as a search term and field meets what Kandinsky called in his paper: “The Spiritual in Art.” Rudolf Steiner defines colors as spiritual beings, has written much on the subject, but only working on it artistically you can get in touch with this reality. The work of art is no longer a rule, a paradigm, is not even teaching, it is in this period of history, revelation, the work is what you feel entering into contact with it. In the fields of color is emotion, thought, memory, endless notes. Each color brings a character, a vibration. As a black artist I work, it’s my way. Both in painting, both ceramic. This means to listen to the material, the artist is, as I conceive it, both the first and the second of the hexagrams of ‘I Ching, the Book of Changes, the artist is the creative and receptive, together, in a lemniscata fruitful. The search of the raw material occupies much space, find pigments which are capable of playing subtle nuances, equivalent to having a good instrument. So these days I started my epic of Tangerine. This being who calls me, I want to ask to be taken to a glaze, attached to a ground to enter into a relationship with the world and with all the hands that touch him. Finally as a colored Prometo I found my Tangerine, Tangerines indeed different, raw nuances in the tests, which need to be transformed into artworks, combined with enamel, bold ideas, impulses of the soul. Tangerines, my Mandarins, such as Simone de Beauvoir are intellectuals, existentialists, that you make so many questions, and then get lost in complicated relationships. My teacher and artistic director of the Academy of Fine Arts always says

“If you give yourself to color, at some point the color gives to you” ….

tangerine test, gress by Manuela Metra