The after-effect of Jemima Wyman’s exhibition Catastrophe Theory: Earthquake Girl and other stories was a mild feeling of nausea. This was in no way induced by the content of the exhibition which was quite playful in tone, but rather a kind of side-effect of the discordant resonating frequencies of colour, too much for the eye to assimilate visually, so passing through to the gut. This physiological tremor was exactly what Wyman was attempting to paint—to paint and not only to represent. What I experienced at Bellas-Milani gallery in February this year may be described as an attack of chromophobia. I resisted a desire to purge.
David Batchelor in his book Chromophobia (2000), argues that colour has been the...
object of extreme prejudice in Western culture. ... Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first colour is made out to be the property of some “foreign” body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.) Either way, colour is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline