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“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

What is the place of color in phenomenology? Color is not usually associated with materiality; or rather, because color is always associated with material objects and cannot be divorced from them, color is not considered as an object in itself. Although phenomenology is most concerned with objects and our perceptions of them, if we consider color as immaterial, does it have a role in this method of thought? In other words, is there an essence to color itself that we perceive and that differs from the ‘thingyness’ from the object?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty treats color precisely as such; a phenomenon worthy of reflection. He claimed that our response to color is pure, that our perception of color is unmediated by discourse, prior knowledge or culture. We respond to certain colors in a certain way because the color itself holds that response. Color allows us to access the world, “meet the universe,” without mediation.
Following this idea, then, pink is intrinsically feminine: we respond to the color as such because there is something about it that conveys femininity. Following this thought, all colors have such unmediated responses: black is inherently associated with death, white with light, blue with the sky. For Merleau-Ponty “color has the merit of getting somewhat nearer to ‘the heart of things.’”(1.) Color is a way to perceive some phenomenon without discursive mediation.
Working 100 years before Merleau-Ponty, the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne utilized color precisely in an attempt to get to “the heart of things.” Cézanne believed that color allows one to access the world prior to having been mediated and corrupted by the “veil of interpretation.”(2.) He saw his job as a painter to “observe nature as it was beneath this veil, to imagine the world as it was before it had been converted into a network of concepts and objects.”(3.) Cézanne’s intentions mirror the attempts of phenomenology to get to some unmediated meaning inherent in the world prior to mediation by discourse, prior knowledge and culture.
For Cézanne, “to paint is to register one’s sensations of color.”(4.) Sensations are, as for Merleau-Ponty, privileged over mediation. They represent a way to get to “the heart of things,” to their essence, the project of phenomenology. This attempt to reach an essence comes through in the work of the painter; his use of color makes clear his attempt to dematerialize the object and have its unmediated essence shine through. When looking at his work it is not because of the figures or forms that we recognize it as a landscape, but rather it is through the choice of color. The formal qualities of the work vaguely refer to mountains, fields, and houses, but if the work had been executed in another palette the painting would be interpreted in a very different way. It is through the earth tones that we understand the painting to be a landscape. Color is what allows us to get to the essence of the work, it is the one element that cannot be changed without drastically changing its interpretation.
The contemporary painter Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe makes use of color much in the same way as Cézanne. In his latest series of predominately pink paintings he wishes the viewer to equate the color with femininity. This follows from the assertion in his Beauty and the Sublime book that beauty is intrinsically feminine while the sublime is not masculine (as was claimed previously) but androgynous(5.).
The concern in the pink series of paintings is to create beauty. By using pink he attempts to access the feminine and thus, logically, the beautiful. It is clear that Gilbert-Rolfe conceives of color as an unmediated phenomenon following Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty.
Gilbert-Rolfe has often stated that the aim of his project is an attempt to get painting beyond discourse. In his essay “Vision’s Resistance to Language” he makes the argument that there is something in the visual that is irreducible to language: “the visual does not necessarily depend on the linguistic and when it does it ceases to that extent to be visual.”(6.) Language and the visual are different fields that cannot be reconciled. What is possible in one is not possible in the other and so if the visual is dependent on language to be effective, then it is by his definition no longer in the visual realm. For Gilbert-Rolfe, then, comics are never visual, because they are dependent on speech bubbles, they are part of language.
In his paintings Gilbert-Rolfe attempts to elicit affective responses in the viewer. One is not supposed to think, through language, “pink is feminine, the feminine is beautiful,” rather, when seeing the pink one is supposed to feel the same response as when in the presence of femininity. Writing on Matisse Gilbert-Rolfe suggests that the former painter’s use of color “follows his interest in pleasurability. It is an insistence on maintaining the instantaneity of the sensuous.”(7.) Instantaneity suggests that the response is unmediated and that like Cézanne he is interested in the sensuous response to color. Matisse, like Cézanne, was interested in a phenomenological response to color.
Writing on the PC-crazed 1980s Gilbert-Rolfe states that dullness and monochrome were considered good because they led to ideas whereas color was considered bad because it “remained at the level of sensation rather than leading to good ideas...”(8.) In his writing and painting it is clear that Gilbert-Rolfe wishes to reverse this privileging of mediation over sensation following the phenomenological project of Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne and Matisse before him. Gilbert-Rolfe is not interested in signification, like phenomenology, his interest lies only in the sensual, affective, and unmediated responses to color.