Olafur Eliasson’s monumental Your blue welcome intersects the theoretical and planar elements central to his oeuvre with philosophy that glows in sharp blue light. Instrumentally active in the Berlin art scene since his founding of a studio there in 1995, Eliasson is an avid writer and scholar of phenomenological experience; even before the 2012 execution of this work, he voiced the agency of its river shade. In his 2006 text “Some Ideas about Color”, for example, Eliasson articulated the passage of azure when rendered monochromatically from a space for viewers to both collectively and self-specify, towards a path to retinal after-images grounded in broader history. Believing that a plane with one chromatic wavelength only has the power to impress upon viewers a genre of hyper-vision that can visually materialize in an outside world and individuals witnessed more clearly, he demonstrates the capacity of this later piece to help its onlookers “see [themselves] in a different light”. With senses and ethics sharpened after gazing into its culturally and socially-mirroring field of unified hue, a saturated orange afterimage results from technical color memory that will over time fade into white, a tone itself explained by Eliasson to have for centuries religiously invoked open space for self-realization.

Still technology-focused art historian Caroline A. Jones’s seminal 2007 essay on the artist, “The Server/User Mode”, can aptly frame the storied underpinnings of an existential eye essential to reading Your blue welcome. She notably bridges a connection between Eliasson’s pushes from his studio, seen as a laboratory for relational and experimental temporality, and the thoughts of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. When describing the dynamics of a river, an expressive vehicle elsewhere crucial to Eliasson, Merleau-Ponty discussed its metaphor for time in terms of a “relation to things” that provide “a witness of its course”. The shimmer that duplicates the universe through a lens of shifting light like water in the present lot similarly anchors progressions of time for grouped structures of localized users. Interacting with his production of a close-knit cultural network through physics and a tint spectrum activated, the “You” referenced in Eliasson’s title also relates to themes of confrontation and the ethical implications of pronouns. His particular “You” here accumulates a geographical map of subjective differences into an ambiguous whole, which has the potential to reassemble identities following the break of past universalism.

Additionally central to Jones’s interpretation of Eliasson’s collective consciousness, reflected in the sheen of this piece tiered like steps through time, is the importance of “knowledge production” to his multifaceted studio practice. Jones analytically links his motivation to alleviate tensions between research and produced experience with Gilles Deleuze’s inferences from Michel Foucault’s writings on knowledge. Expert cognition from Deleuze and Foucault’s standpoint possesses a consistent “double” in “speaking and seeing, language and light”. Correspondingly principled, Eliasson’s magnification of sensory phenomena in Your blue welcome operates through a seamless blend between baroque narrative, and postmodern industry; merging how Annibale Carracci in Southern Europe and Peter Paul Rubens in the North utilized altered perspective in ceiling painting to facilitate viewer participation in themes of myth, royalty, and religion, with how Marcel Duchamp incorporated the machine of the readymade into conceptual life. Likewise with the language and sight of history behind his magnetic material, Eliasson manifests his candidates for reflection involved in a science of performative social distribution, engineered in prismatic color.

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