"Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? – Detail"

pigment based inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag extra bright, 308 g/m2

titled, dated, signed, and numbered (pencil) on verso

Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? is an incomplete work series, which selichar started in 1990; it discusses the most elementary conditions of images – the mediatized and painted images likewise. in this context, the artist operates with the interplay of analogy and deviation.¹ Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? refers to a work of the colourfield-painter barnett newman. in order to contrast the modernist dogma of the de-stijl-artist with a freed colour effect, he had painted, at the end of the sixties, a work series titled Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green?, consisting of four pictures: pictures in increasing formats that confront the primary colours of painting in vertical stripes with each other. the, by selichar practiced deviation, derives from the frame conditions of the television picture – or the primary colours of other mass media such as colour photography, of the video and film. whereas the painted picture, referred to by newman, is composed of „pure“ colours, the television picture constitutes itself with the help of the combinated green. here, the auratising of painting through pure colours, there the bastardising of the television through – in terms of painting – combination colours;
… as second analogue functions the image- and colour field proportions, which selichar uses in this work scene: from the first standardized television frame format to a virtual panorama television format up to the cinemascope format, all frame sizes, which are available for the present-day eye as standardized frame conditions. with the visualizing of the workaday perspective, the artist not only infiltrates the aesthetical paradigm of the golden section, of the idealized since „natural“ format conditions, but also determines to what an extent the new media have departed from the roots of the picture.
(Christoph Doswald)²

Notes

1
Uli Bohnen, "Between and Across the Media, Naturally!," in: Uli Bohnen, Christoph Doswald, Walter Seitter, Günther Selichar. Suchbilder, Salzburg/València 1993/94, p. 14.

2
Christoph Doswald, "Der Ursprung des Bildes. Günther Selichar," in: Gerhard Finckh (ed.), Positionen. Reisen an die Grenzen der Malerei, Essen 1996, and in: Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Sandro Droschl, Abstraction now, Graz 2004.