Keren Benbenisty

Mandarin peels mounted on archival digital inkjet print, H.33″ L.43” in. A series of drawing-flags, ballpoint blue pen on polyester blank ready-made white flags, H.60” L.36” in. 2015

An imaginary map based on database of 113 names of commercial blue colors. In the contemporary industry, colors are poetically named, in addition to their commercial codes. These fake names of synthetic colors, take all that color had been with reference to the world of plants, bugs and minerals and adds the magic of artifice, frequently the colonial exotic, as Roland Barthes notes, when he buys colors he does so according to the “mere sight of their name. The name of the color outlines a kind of generic region within which the exact, special effect of color in unforeseeable: the name is then a promise of a pleasure, the program of an operation.”

Installation view, Sextant, NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY