A text on a black background announces Monday Red. A white room is seen from above. Each of the six shots of the video is an accelerated sequence shot with a camera attached to the ceiling. Baldessari enters by a door with a pot of red paint and repaints the room, starting with the corners, drawing a cube in perspective in what initially appeared to be a white rectangle, then he entirely covers the room, leaving a red rectangle behind him. After having left the room, Tuesday Orange appears on a black background, and the scenario is repeated for 6 days, with the use of all of the primary and complementary colours, Wednesday Yellow, Thursday Green, Friday Blue, ending with Saturday Violet. On the last day, once the work is finished, Baldessari takes the time to stop, to make a portrait of the painter in his work, before leaving and shutting the door to conclude the sequence. The painting's line of questioning is posed directly in relation to minimalism. The succession of coloured rectangles naturally evokes the repetition and formal research of minimal art, but there again a touch of irony is slipped into the artistic reference. Baldessari plays the artisan, dressed as a building painter, in contrast to the industrial and hence very “clean” aspect of the minimalists. Messy manual work comes to destroy the very intellectual image of minimalist painting, 'demoting' it to artisanal practice. Furthermore, the link between colour and the day appears to be an absurd collage, which annuls any intellectual speculation. Patricia Maincent Translated Originally shot in super 8, these four, very short sequence shots each evoke colour and painting in their own ways, while questioning the medium of film. These close-up and almost intimate shots focus on the artist's hands, which manipulate coloured elements. In the first shot, the artist presents opposing dynamics. As he holds an egg timer in one hand, with its blue sand running out, in the other hand he holds a thermometer, whose red indicator goes from an ice-cold temperature, to boiling. This spectacular display is a cinematic illusion, with no basis in reality. We find this game of mystification again in the third sequence, in which Baldessari reproduces the magic of the miracle of Christ transforming water into wine, then back into water. This magic show parodies religion as much as the veracity of the filmed document. In the second sequence, Baldessari holds two small disks with portraits à la Warhol. He successively turns each disk over to reveal a mirrored surface that dazzles the camera. This small gesture reduces the history of cinema to a dazzling and hypnotic interplay of lights and actresses. In the last shot, he successively plunges his thumbs into recipients full of green and yellow pigment. The volatile pigment flies away and creates random traces on the white background, composing a painting. In this parodic reference to abstract expressionism, the pictorial gesture is reduced to the use of the thumb.

Patricia Maincent 

Translated by Anna Knight