RIC-J:  Yves Klein, why this fascination for blue?

YK: Blue is life, the ocean, the infinite. Something inaccessible and incomplete. A perfection in this idea of ​​the detail that is missing and of all that surrounds us (and crushes us). We are only a red dot in this sea of ​​blue, we men. There, in a corner, on this planet (blue, too).

RIC-J: Do you see the world in blue?

YK: Is there another color? Give me a fairly large brush and I will repaint the whole world in blue! It seems to me that work has already begun a bit, as if god were a painter rather than an architect. It is like this game for children where it is necessary to connect these points together to form a mysterious figure. Then, let’s trace a line (blue one, of course) between these isolated blue houses on the cliffs of Santorini, these little palaces painted with indigo on the slopes on the hills of Jodhpur, these fetiches covered with blue pigments piled high in the temples of the Abomey, these ceramics of the East India Company piled up in the holds of a galleon flowed off the Philippines… and let’s see.

RIC-J: And what figure do they reveal, all these points?

YK: The silhouette of a woman. It can not be otherwise. What else, if not this? Nothing else would make sense. The silhouette of a woman is the perfection of the creator. My first “blue anthropometry”, I made it by highlighting in blue the silhouette of a woman, a woman I loved, thrown by the shadow of a damning sun on the white of a bare wall. Since then we have separated; I know that she tore up pages from a collection of poems by Szymborska to stick them on this memory of us. But the painting is still here. Below new souvenirs.

RIC-J: On which medium do you prefer to paint?

YK: You already know my answer, right?

RIC-J: I’d like to hear it from you …

YK: Got it. So: human skin. Breasts, especially. When the paint clings to the nipple, to the center of the nipple, that part of savagery that there is on the bodies of women, this roughness. When I stroke and crush it a little with my brush, with my fingers loaded with pigments… You see? You imagine? Painting on a canvas or any other support is no longer of interest when you have tasted the sensuality of painting on a woman.

RIC-J: In the memory of a Sufi patient, could you please describe life in two words?

YK: Rationality and pragmatism.   Blue apple.

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