HOLI - A JOURNEY INTO COLOR

It is like the chemical reaction of an explosion: the closed mouth, shaped like a four-leaf clover, is the spark from which the breath of flame emerges, channeled into the pyrotechnic vault of a hand closed around powder ready to ignite.

From the clenched palms, a pyrotechnic display paints all of India and Nepal during the Holi Festival, a folkloric-religious celebration that embraces a wide range of events, from the arrival of spring to the perpetual renewal of life, with its mythological roots grounded in the burning of the malevolent and zoomorphic deity Holika, with the appearance of an orca, from which the festival takes its name. Following the Hindu calendar, the Holi Festival 2025 will take place from March 14th to 17th, in a sublime human amalgam tinted in Fauvist hues. Made from corn flour and food colouring, the Holi palette is a symbolic painting tool: red, derived from sandalwood, dried hibiscus flowers, and pomegranate roots, epitomizes passion and the eternal love between the deities Krishna and Radha; Bael fruits, chickpea powder, marigold petals, turmeric, and saffron dissolved in water are measured to obtain orange and yellow, both emblems of vital energy. Green, obtained from pressed seasonal leaves and berries, is a wish for fertility, while blue and purple, extracted from grapes, begonias, and beets, scatter wisdom onto the hands and faces of the participants. Transforming the skin into a canvas for pictorial and religious experimentation, the Holi Festival departs from Western colour traditions only in its euphoric use of pigment, compensating with a spiritual closeness and the numerous colour theories that have shaped art and Catholicism.

The first among the great theorists of colour was Aristotle, who, in his work De sensu et sensibilibus, analyzed colour both as a physical phenomenon and as a symbolic medium. Aristotle saw color as the result of opposing natural forces, a perfectly calibrated combination of light and darkness, diluted in a spectrum of nuances. Not without ideological connotation, Aristotle associated white with the purity of light, while black symbolized universal darkness, in a dialectic between light and shadow through which various hues unraveled. Dante Alighieri would be the first to adopt this narrative connotation in his Divine Comedy. Dante used chromatic symbolism in such a way that it not only enriched the poetic language with an immense visual component but also became a philosophical and theological tool to explain the conditions of the human soul. While Aristotle saw colour as the result of opposing natural forces, Dante adapted it to his moral and spiritual conception, a reflection of virtue or vice, purification or damnation. In the Divine Comedy, colours act as indicators of a cosmic order, where they serve as a metaphor for a spiritual and moral condition. The light radiating from Paradise, described in terms of dazzling splendor, is the same light the soul reaches when it purifies itself and ascends towards God. The use of white in Paradise, especially in the vision of the blessed and in the appearance of Beatrice, thus represents the realization of spiritual perfection, the achievement of final illumination, a transition from the twilight of Inferno and Purgatory to the full splendor of God.

Red, which Aristotle associated with vitality and passion, becomes in the Divine Comedy a symbol of passion and guilt, but also of sacrifice and purification. In Purgatory is tied to the purifying fire that burns but does not destroy, symbolizing the purification of the soul that, though afflicted by passion, is destined to be renewed. In Inferno, black is the dominant shade. The damned are immersed in an abyss of darkness that not only refers to physical darkness but also to a condition of absolute distance from light. The darkness of sin is the most brutal form of separation from the divine order. Between these two polarities lies Goethe, who, in the 18th century, forged a more emotionally and psychologically rooted understanding, placing colour at the center of sensory perception. In a radical way, Goethe rejected the mechanistic conception of light and, in his treatise Theory of Colours, defined colour as a sensible phenomenon, an intermediary between light and darkness that profoundly affects the human soul. For Goethe, colours are not merely visual attributes but are charged with emotional power, with an influence that transcends their physicality.

Red, with its intensity, is not only the color of passion but also of anger and vitality. Blue, on the contrary, communicates a sense of serenity, of absolute calm, but also of sadness and contemplation. Goethe, therefore, did not limit himself to treating colour as an optical property but as a language that manifests in the soul, determining and modulating our emotional state. These insights find a powerful echo in spiritual traditions, such as the Indian one, where colour is a vehicle for broader meanings. In the Holi Festival, each color brought by the powder is not merely an aesthetic but a true energy that acts on the collective psyche. Green, a symbol of rebirth, merges with yellow, the colour of solar energy and knowledge, while blue, with its mystical aura, evokes the depth of introspection and wisdom. The entire festival becomes a sensory and spiritual reclaiming of color, which loses its exclusive decorative function to become a medium for universal communication.

This philosophical reflection is complemented by the more sophisticated and historical vision that the historian Michel Pastoureau elaborated in his study of colours in the Middle Ages. Pastoureau describes color as a language that speaks not only to the heart and mind but also to culture and religion. For medieval thought, colors were symbols of power and hierarchies, bearers of well-defined religious and moral meanings. In The Little Book of Colors, red was the color of sacrifice, while blue (to which he dedicated an entire essay, Blue: The History of a Color) was associated with the Virgin Mary, a symbol of purity and celestial protection. However, Pastoureau does not limit himself to tracing the history of the symbolism of colour but also explores its evolution through the centuries, showing how the meanings attributed to colours change with the shifting cultures and societies. If the Middle Ages perceived color as a sign of distinction between the sacred and the profane, in the modern age colour becomes an autonomous language, a means of expression that transcends convention and tradition. From the refracted gemlike hues of Baroque paintings that rendered not only the folds of drapery but also the voluptuous curves of Rubens’ monumental femininity and Caravaggio’s cadaverous sacredness — both symptomatic of a new humanism radically contested by the temporal power of monarchy and the spiritual power of the Church — to the pastel sweetness and almost sugary elegance of Fragonard and François Boucher’s fêtes galantes, which, with their faded essence, seem to presage the imminent evaporation of the Ancien Régime, we arrive at a modernity that transcends the collective, surpasses the imaginary and didactic, to become pure expression of the self.

Discovered only in 1986, hidden in a barn in a Swedish agricultural landscape, 1,200 works by an unknown painter reveal the roots of pre-Kandinsky abstraction, unveiling to the world the esoteric and masterful use of colour by Hilma Af Klint. From Tree of Knowledge, No. 1 to No. 3, Altarpiece (Altarbild), through The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood , the painter develops a kind of esoteric painting, an electroencephalogram of present perceptions translated onto canvas. The abstraction of her paintings is nothing but the whisper of her contact with the occult, a relationship inexplicable by the pure standards of depiction but perfectly understandable through colour. At the farthest extremes of this chromatic identification journey, surpassing the simple association of red-Titian or yellow-Vermeer, we find contemporary artists, who, like the Hindus, embody a specific colour, clutching it in their palms with the ultimate goal of an ideological and nominal osmosis between the artist and their hue. In 1955, the artist Yves Klein, along with chemical producer Edouard Adam, created a synthetic version — rebranded as Klein Blue (or International Klein Blue, IKB) — of ultramarine blue, which had previously been made only with natural materials like lapis lazuli. By mixing pigments and resins, they achieved a tone that almost seemed to float in the air, without apparent depth, yet simultaneously suggested an infinite vastness. For Klein, blue represented the immensity of the universe, the cosmic void, and at the same time, spirituality and immateriality, becoming the protagonist of his “monochromes” and performances where the colour itself was used as the absolute focus.

In this pursuit of identification, fits the work of Anish Kapoor, as he has pushed the perception of colour in a radically new direction with his use of Vantablack, the darkest pigment in the world. This black, which absorbs almost 99.96% of light, is not merely a shadow, but a total absence, a colour that inhibits the perception of form, nullifying depth and volume, making us experience colour not as a visible sign but as an idea of emptiness, a sensory paradox. Kapoor has transformed colour into a philosophical reflection, a search that becomes space, silence, and absence.

From the Eco Green, patented in 2020 by Sylvain Boyer and revolutionary in its reduced ink consumption for minimal environmental impact, to the Pinkiest Pink created by Stuart Semple in 2021, an ultra-bright, entirely synthetic pink that gained fame for the restriction Semple placed on its use (available to all artists except Kapoor), colour is humanity’s longest-lasting perceptual legacy, the only element that, across cultures, has anchored itself to a value-laden substratum almost always consistent, at times resistant to trends, at times more inclined to dissolve, but always and forever the hub of a festival of symbols and associations that, in human communication dynamics, serves as a bridge between the real and the suggested, between the human and the divine, like the rainbow that the deities Indra and Iris established in the sky to remind mortals of the path to eternity.