Hugo Roelandt

The projects Colourframe / Nuances of White / Variations of White are studies of light and colour, immaterial works which consist solely out of the manipulation of light and space. There is no use of what are usually considered as artistically suitable materials, but of new techniques that deal with the rest form, the surroundings, the environment. The environment of man becomes the subject of the project.

In Colourframe (+ + + = +) a form of electronic image is abstracted is suggested. The residual value of every video image is analysed. A mixture of additive and reflected subtractive colours shows what happens in one pixel of a colour monitor. The project consists of three different spheres with in each of them a video monitor. Every sphere only exists as a colour space in which the presence of the video monitor functions as complimentary colour. The three spheres consist (through ambient lighting) of the primary colours of the colour triangle (red – green – blue). The monitors in every space always show the complementary colour (cyan – magenta – yellow). The additive process of the colour mixture of the light of the space (itself the result of reflected subtractive colour mixture) and the light of the monitor is shown. The medium ‘video’ in this way shows its own process – without resulting to one of the innumerable attempts to fill the screen in a figurative way, without turning video art in to a cheap form of narrative film. 

The project Colourframe (+ + + = +) was never realised as described above, but was the basis of a series of projects by Hugo Roelandt with space and light. Thus his 1986 exposition of the empty inside of a shipping container (with a mirror at the end and a strong orange light lighting up the orange inside), or a colour show brightening up the neoclassical façade and garden of the Antwerp Academy in 1996, or a series of light projects from the 1990s.

(Abstracts from Hugo Roelandt: Let's Expand The Sky, red. Mark Holthof, Occasional Papers, London, 2016)