Yves Klein may be one of the first European artists to have taken an explicit interest in Aboriginal visual art. This catalog offers a poetic and completely new approach to his work, placed in perspective with the works of twelve Aboriginal artists.
Published on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition held at the Opale Foundation (in Lens, Switzerland), the book Rêver dans le rêve des autres (Dreaming in the dream of others) presents the work of Yves Klein alongside with works by twelve Aboriginal artists (Angkaliya Curtis, Bardayal "Lofty" Nadjamerrek, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Danie Mellor, Dhambit Munungurr, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ignatia Djanghara, Paddy Bedford, Waigan Djanghara, Wattie Karruwara, Judy Watson, and Paji Honeychild Yankarr), showing how the link between the French artist and the world of the Australian Aborigines is anything but arbitrary. Klein was very interested in the non-Western: works from his youth have been discovered in his archives that were later identified as copies of Aboriginal motifs, and his writings confirm that he was familiar with the cave paintings of north-western Australia. In the '50s, Aboriginal art, which was little known, was seen not as the expression of a different spirit, but rather as the survival of a vanished spirit, in short, that of the Neolithic: Yves Klein, like his parents, was fascinated by prehistory.
Yves Klein, born in 1928 in Nice, had as a first vocation to be a judoka. It was only back in Paris, in 1954, that he dedicated himself fully to art, setting out on his "adventure into monochrome".
Animated by a quest to "liberate colour from the prison that is the line", Yves Klein directed his attention to the monochrome which, to him, was the only form of painting that allowed to "make visible the absolute".
By choosing to express feeling rather than figurative form, Yves Klein moved beyond ideas of artistic representation, conceiving the work of art instead as a trace of communication between the artist and the world; invisible truth made visible. His works, he said, were to be "the ashes of his art", traces of that which the eye could not see.
Yves Klein's practice revealed of new way of conceptualising the role of the artist, conceiving his whole life as an artwork. "Art is everywhere that the artist goes", he once declared. According to him, beauty existed everywhere, but in a state of invisibility. His task was to to capture beauty wherever it might be found, in matter as in air.
The artist used blue as the vehicle for his quest to capture immateriality and the infinite. His celebrated bluer-than-blue hue, soon to be named "IKB" (International Klein Blue), radiates colourful waves, engaging not only the eyes of the viewer, but in fact allowing us see with our souls, to read with our imaginations.
From monochromes, to the void, to his "technique of living brushes" or "Anthropometry"; by way of his deployment of nature's elements in order to manifest their creative life-force; and his use of gold as a portal to the absolute; Yves Klein developed a ground-breaking practice that broke down boundaries between conceptual art, sculpture, painting, and performance.
Just before dying, Yves Klein told a friend, "I am going to go into the biggest studio in the world, and I will only do immaterial works."
Between May 1954 and June 6, 1962, the date of his death, Yves Klein burned his life to make a flamboyant work that marked his era and still shines today.
