#29 What’s your colour?

He worked as an engineer, in a bank, as management consultant... then something came to change the colour of his life. Today the books of the Hop-Cik-Yaya series, starring a very special detective, written by Mehmet Murat Somer are translated by Penguin in the USA, Edition Masque in France, Klett-Cotta Tropen in Germany, Rocco in Brazil, Sellerio i...

What’s the most important life lesson that colour has taught you? I think it was a study of a Venetian painter from the 1950s, Mario De Luigi, an artist who unfortunately has been forgotten by many. Reading through his notes and writings, I came across a statement of his that said: “All I do is take away colour to get to the light”. It was...

What does colour mean to you? For me, colour is a kind of expression of life. Although I always wear black and wear the same colour make-up, I am particularly interested in strong, powerful colours. I don’t particularly like soft shades. I see colour as a life thing, especially in relation to very strong, bright colours. As far as black is con...

Soft words, cold colours and bitter winds. These are all examples of synesthesia, from the Greek words syn (union) and aisthesis (sensation), and they describe the links between things from different sensory areas. The decadent poets of the nineteenth century thought of synesthesia as nothing less than an artistic manifesto. In the twentieth centu...

Blue like the women Yves Klein once stuck to a large sheet of paper so they could leave their marks, after every part of their body associated with fertility – breasts, stomach and thighs – had been painted in bright colours. The resulting Anthropométries were monuments to life, a combination of substance and flesh on the one hand, and sky and...

Give me your definition of an “ideal manifesto” for your Earth The most advanced side of the human psyche has always imitated Nature: machines operate as if they were extensions of our arms, legs or brains, but mainly as images and representations of animals prowling through two forests: the manmade one of cables and technology, and the remo...

Any person, group of people, city, country, or company is sometimes identified with a colour; tell us a colour: red, yellow, green, blue…. If I should try to describe illy I’d say red… probably for the red logo, a symbol of passion and love that has a strong goal. Berlin would be described as green city, as the hope of a united country,...