Description

Absolute Color 01, acrylic on paper, 6×4.5 inches (15x11cm), 2025

Painting Information

Absolute Color: A Poetic Exploration of Bartosz Beda’s Luminous Ambiguity

Between Figure and Abstraction – A Vision in Color

Bartosz Beda’s Absolute Color 01 is a small painting with an outsized presence. At first glance, one might see only turbulent swaths of paint and absolute saturation – a cascade of hues that seem to both conceal and reveal forms. Beda is known as an abstract figurative painter, and here he achieves that “perfect marriage” of representation and abstraction he often strives for (studiointernational.com). In this intimate 6 x 4.5 inch composition, a viewer senses hints of something familiar – perhaps the contour of a house or the echo of a human silhouette – submerged in a current of gestural brushstrokes. Yet nothing is clearly defined. Beda starts with an abstract image and allows a figure or object to emerge, balancing the two so that “neither one overpower[s] the other” (studiointernational.com). In Absolute Color 01, this balance invites us into a visual in-betweenness: we are caught between recognizing a form and surrendering to pure color, much like making out shapes in clouds. The result is an image that is clearly legible yet deliberately fragmented, encouraging multiple interpretations rather than a fixed narrative (bartoszbeda.com).

Such ambiguity is the hallmark of Beda’s technique. His process often involves building up layers of paint, then marring or obscuring the very figures he has rendered (bartoszbeda.com). In this painting, one can imagine Beda laying down a swift sketch of a structure or figure – only to submerge it under bold strokes of absolute color. The acrylic on paper surface carries the energy of quick execution: perhaps a swipe of a palette knife or the imprint of a textured rag (Beda has spoken of using unconventional tools like plastic wrap and stencils to create lively surfaces (studiointernational.com). The resulting textures create a sense of movement and “chaos” – yet within that chaos, as Beda says, “there is always some kind of order”(studiointernational.com). The painting hovers between chaos and control, giving it a dynamic, breathing quality. For the viewer, this means the eye is constantly kept in motion – one moment catching on what looks like the angle of a roof, the next dissolving into a flurry of color that suggests sky, foliage, or perhaps pure emotion.

The Emotional Weight of Color

As the title Absolute Color suggests, color is the beating heart of this painting’s expression. Beda deploys color not as a mere descriptive tool but as an almost musical force – one that “directly influences the soul,” in Wassily Kandinsky’s famous phrase (bradseverance.com). Standing before Absolute Color 01, one is struck by the intensity of its palette: highly saturated hues command attention, “pushing the viewer’s focus toward the most visually assertive areas”store.bartoszbeda.com. Perhaps a searing orange or crimson red takes center stage, radiating warmth and fervor; or a deep cobalt blue pools in a corner, pulling the viewer into a contemplative depth. In Beda’s hands, such colors carry emotional and symbolic weight. They recall the bold, feeling-laden use of color by Expressionist painters – Egon Schiele’s sickly greens to evoke raw vulnerability, or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s violent reds to intensify urban alienation (store.bartoszbeda.com). But Beda’s approach is uniquely his own: his colors tend to be “muted yet layered,” creating a sense of psychological complexity as figures “emerge and dissolve into ambiguous color fields” (store.bartoszbeda.com). In Absolute Color 01, the layered washes and opaque passages of paint seem to alternately hide and reveal emotion. A patch of somber grey or muddy brown might suggest a shadow of melancholy beneath brighter layers, while a sudden streak of white could feel like a flash of insight or hope piercing through.

Color here is not just visual but emotional language. Throughout art and culture, colors have been used symbolically to convey moods and stories, and Beda taps into this rich language. Consider literature: in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the very title color signifies a beauty and spiritual presence in the world that often goes unnoticed (enotes.com) – a reminder to find hope and divinity in everyday life. By contrast, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses a rancid, “unclean yellow” to symbolize decay and mental oppressionsparknotes.com. Beda’s painting, with its interplay of luminous and muddy tones, seems to carry both these poles of meaning – the sublime and the oppressive potential of color – within its small frame. Just as literature assigns symbolic roles to colors, Absolute Color 01 may be seen as a drama of colors enacting their own story: perhaps a warm goldenrod yellow battling to break free from an encroaching darkness of indigo, or a blood-red form asserting itself against fields of ashen white. The viewer is left to intuit what these colors might mean: is that red a symbol of life-force, like the little girl’s red coat shining defiantly in Schindler’s List, a lone beacon of innocence amid horror? Or is it a warning “red flag,” a cry for help in the visual symphony? In the monochrome world of Spielberg’s film, a single spot of red carried an entire emotional narrative of hope and loss (sparknotes.com). In Beda’s painting, by contrast, we have a cacophony of hues – an ensemble of colors – yet each seems loaded with feeling, contributing to an overall chord that resonates in the viewer’s mind.

Color in Cinema and Poetry – A Broader Palette of References

Beda’s Absolute Color 01 does not exist in a vacuum; it resonates with a broader cultural understanding of color’s power in art, film, and poetry. Viewing this painting can evoke the experience of certain films where color becomes the protagonist. One is reminded of Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993) – an audacious work consisting of an unchanging blue screen accompanied by music and narration. Jarman was inspired by artist Yves Klein’s monochromes, seeking an “inner world” through pure color (bfi.org.uk). The “seductive uniformity” of Klein’s International Klein Blue canvases invites spectators to step into a void of their own interpretationbfi.org.uk, much as Jarman’s blue screen envelops viewers in a flood of sensations and thought. In Absolute Color 01, though multicolored, there is a similar invitation into a sensory realm defined by color – a kind of atmospheric haze that we must penetrate with imagination. The painting’s abstract washes could be likened to cinematic color fields: think of the way Wong Kar-wai drenches scenes in lush neon hues to externalize longing and nostalgia, or how Hitchcock bathes Madeleine in Vertigo with an eerie green light to signal otherworldly obsession. Such cinematic uses of color heighten emotion without words. Beda’s painting, in its silence, achieves a comparable effect: its colors speak in tones of passion, mystery, and introspection.

Even poetry has its kinship with a work like Absolute Color 01. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud famously assigned colors to vowels – “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue…” – attempting to synesthetically capture the essence of sound and sight. That poem “Voyelles” is an attempt to find the absolute in color and sound, much as Beda’s painting searches for an absolute language of color beyond concrete imagery. The tones and gestures in the painting feel poetic – as if each streak of color is a line of verse, rich with unspoken meaning.

A Psychological and Sensory Space

Though modest in scale, Absolute Color 01 creates a psychological space as immersive as a large canvas. There is an almost paradoxical effect when you stand before it (or hold it in hand, given its size): the closer you look, the more the boundaries of the image seem to expand in your mind’s eye. This phenomenon calls to mind the experience of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings. Critics note that Rothko’s enormous hazy rectangles of color can provoke profound emotional responses, sometimes moving viewers to tears (trurocollegeartanddesign.wordpress.com). Why? Perhaps because, as art historian James Elkins observes, when you approach a Rothko, “you may find yourself lost in a smear of colors… Everything conspires to overload the senses: the empty incandescent rectangles of colour… entirely encompassing your field of vision… the weird sense that the colour is very far away, yet suffocatingly close”. In Absolute Color 01, the scale is reversed – it does not encompass your field of vision – yet intriguingly, it achieves a similar “all around you” feeling in the imagination. Gazing into its layered pigments, one can feel pulled in, as if the edges of the paper were merely a window onto an infinite expanse of color and texture. The painting’s palette and gestural rhythms create a mood that seeps into the viewer’s psyche. There is a push and pull at play: colors that comfort and cushion the eye, and abrupt forms or contrasts that startle and unsettle – “both threatened and comforted, both cushioned and asphyxiated,” to borrow Elkins’ vivid description of the Rothko effect. Beda achieves this dynamic tension on a minimal surface, a testament to how concentrated and potent his visual language has become. It is as if Absolute Color 01 is a tiny stage where a grand drama of the subconscious is being enacted in pure pigment.

Part of this psychological invitation comes from the painting’s stance between abstraction and figuration. With no clear narrative scene, viewers are free to project their own memories and emotions onto it. Is that blurred form in the center a distant house in a storm, conjuring feelings of home or isolation? Is it a human presence dissolving into the ether, suggesting the fragility of identity? Beda often uses familiar motifs in his broader work – faces, religious icons, historical figures – only to distort and transform them, “removing or altering” parts of the image to explore feelings and selfhood. Absolute Color 01 might be doing this in microcosm. It situates itself between reality and dream, much like a half-remembered scene or a fleeting afterimage on the retina. In that sense, the painting becomes a psychological landscape – a place where viewers can wander with their senses, much as one does when listening to instrumental music that has no words, only the rise and fall of feeling.

The Concept of “Absolute Color” and Its Implications

The title Absolute Color invites reflection. What does it mean to call a painting “absolute color”? In art theory, “absolute” often implies purity or autonomy – think of “absolute music,” which is music for its own sake, not meant to tell a story or paint a picture. By naming this work Absolute Color, Beda might be playfully positioning it as a piece where color is freed from the duty of description and allowed to exist for its own expressive sake. And indeed, in this painting color is protagonist, subject, and object all at once. However, there is irony here: the painting is not a flat field of one hue (like a Klein monochrome); it is full of blended tones and ghostly forms. It suggests that even in an exploration of pure color, the artist finds traces of reality creeping in. The “representational” and the “abstract” are not opposing forces here but complementary ones. The Absolute in the title might hint at an ideal that is purposely unattainable – a kind of thought experiment. Perhaps Beda posits: What if a painting could be nothing but pure color… and then shows us that even then, the mind will seek images, the hand will produce textures and suggestions that tether even the purest color to human experience.

Formally, Absolute Color 01 showcases Beda’s expressive material handling in a distilled form. Working with acrylic on paper at this scale likely means he had to be decisive and spontaneous. Acrylic dries quickly, which can trap gestures in mid-motion; every brushstroke in this piece has a sense of urgency and presence. One can imagine thick swipes of paint set against areas where a wash was allowed to bleed and soak into the fiber of the paper. There may even be scratchy lines where Beda drew with the brush’s tip or the wooden end, or areas of drybrush scumble creating a dusty veil of color. These textural contrasts – glossy vs. matte, opaque vs. translucent – enrich the painting’s surface. They remind us that paint is a physical substance as well as a vehicle of image and idea. Beda’s broader practice often emphasizes this materiality: he is known to layer paint heavily in some works, carving into it, or to leave portions raw and untouched. In this petite work, every millimeter counts, and we sense the artist’s hand in every mark. There is conceptual rigor in the way he limits the composition to elemental components (color, shape, hint of figure), yet there is also a sensual joy in the handling of those components – the drips, swirls, and scrapes that animate the piece. This union of concept and craft is a hallmark of Beda’s art.

It’s worth noting that Beda’s art often engages with larger ideas beyond the canvas, even political or historical ones. In past series, he has invoked historical figures, biblical narratives, and cultural icons, using them as springboards to discuss contemporary issues or psychological statesbartoszbeda.com. He has even undertaken projects like painting daily to reflect on labor and value (savvypainter.com). In that context, Absolute Color 01 can be seen as part of an ongoing inquiry: an inquiry into how meaning can be constructed (or deconstructed) visually. By stripping a painting down to color and abstracted form, Beda challenges us to find meaning not in a clear story or subject, but in the act of seeing itself. The title’s promise of absoluteness might also wink at the impossibility of separating color from context – after all, even colors carry cultural and personal connotations (Beda himself has noted that he associates blue with America and its ethos, showing how context imprints on our perception of color). Thus Absolute Color 01 might be a meditation on the pure and the impure: pure color as an ideal, and the impure, rich mix of associations and sensations that actually arises when we experience color in the real world.

Conclusion: An Invitation to the Senses

In blending art-critical insight with a poetic sensibility, one might say Absolute Color 01 is a painting that collectors and dreamers alike could appreciate. It stands as a vivid testament to Bartosz Beda’s ability to meld conceptual depth with expressive freedom. On one hand, it’s a piece of rigorous inquiry – a small manifesto about color and perception. On the other, it hits you in the gut, like a beautiful piece of music, bypassing intellectual analysis and going straight to feeling. The painting invites us into an ambiguous, intense world the way a powerful poem or film does: we step into its atmosphere and come out with our senses sharpened. Beda has framed this work in the context of his abstract figurative practice, which means he gives us just enough of a hint of reality (a shape here, a title suggestive of something essential) and then lets the imagination complete the picture. In that fertile gap, the viewer’s experience flourishes. Absolute Color 01 may be small in size, but it is vast in what it contains: a sky of color, a landscape of the mind, and an emotionally resonant echo that lingers long after you’ve looked away. In the end, the painting reminds us of the simple yet profound truth that color – absolute, unfettered color – can speak to us in ways that words often cannot, playing upon “the piano of the soul” as Kandinsky would say (bradseverance.com). To stand before Beda’s Absolute Color 01 is to be immersed in that language of color, and to be moved by its intensity, its mystery, and its undeniable humanity wrapped in abstraction.

Sources:

• Niebrugge, Anna. Expose Magazine – “Representation and Abstraction in the Work of Bartosz Beda” bartoszbeda.combartoszbeda.com. (Review of Blast of Absolute exhibition, 2014)

• Wei, Lilly. Studio International – Interview with Bartosz Beda, 2023 studiointernational.com. (Beda on balancing abstraction and representation)

• Bartosz Beda Art Gallery – “How Can the Choices of Color in Abstract Figurative Painting Shift Its Overall Meaning?”store.bartoszbeda.com (Discussion of Beda’s use of muted layered colors and art-historical context)

• Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, via Goodreads bradseverance.com. (Quote: “Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”)

• SparkNotes – Schindler’s List Symbols sparknotes.comsparknotes.com. (Analysis of the girl in the red coat as a symbol of innocence and a cry for help)

• eNotes – The Color Purple Title Significance enotes.com. (Color purple symbolizing unnoticed beauty and spiritual presence)

• BFI – Simon McCallum, “Blue at 30: Derek Jarman’s final film” bfi.org.uk. (Yves Klein’s monochrome blue inviting the viewer into an inner world)

• Freeland, Cynthia (via Truro College Art & Design blog). “Rothko, Colour, and Expression”trurocollegeartanddesign.wordpress.com (Rothko’s emotional use of color and viewers’ reactions)

• SparkNotes – The Yellow Wallpaper Symbols sparknotes.com. (Description of the wallpaper’s “unclean yellow” and its symbolic effect)

• Savvy Painter Interview – “Creating Accessible Art with Bartosz Beda” savvypainter.com. (Beda on perceptions of color related to places and themes)