36 Quotes by Yves Klein

For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.

The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.

I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!.. ..the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.

I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.

The immaterial blue colour shown at Iris Clert's in April had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.

I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood...

I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France.

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.