36 Quotes by Yves Klein

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?

I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

Hours of preparation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.

The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' - that was what I needed.

For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.