Blue Green Red

Since the invention of color television, we have been inundated with red, green, and blue. Every image we see, every film or tv show, photo taken on a phone, memory relayed back to us on a digital display, is made of these three hues, organised in pixels to trick the eye into believing that our lives are made up of more than simple colours. Yet when Ellsworth Kelly painted this image, the color TV was hardly a decade old, and only just beginning to permeate into the American household. His painting is perhaps not the abstraction it seems, but rather a diagram that free us from the abstractions of television. Kelly is presenting the building blocks of our visual world, not allowing them to hide in the falsity of organisation but presenting them bare, telling us that this is what our world is made of. This simple canvas contains within it infinities.