Blue Painting 2000

Curator: What do you think, gazing at Joseph Marioni's "Blue Painting" from the year 2000? Feels like staring into the heart of something ancient, doesn't it? Editor: Well, "heart" might be putting it strongly. My first thought is... it's blue. Very blue. Intensely, uniformly blue. Like an ocean of pure pigment contained in a square. Curator: Precisely! Think of the symbolic weight of blue, across cultures – royalty, spirituality, even melancholy. Marioni strips it bare, presenting the essence of "blue-ness" itself. There are layers here that need to be excavated to understand their place. Editor: And I do appreciate that reduction. This feels like a continuation of that minimalist project to pare everything down. He's asking us to really consider the colour itself, how it affects us on a gut level. But what's it all about? It is like an icon, or an alterpiece. Curator: I'm sure Marioni wanted the purity of that kind of affect. Like gazing at the sky at night or standing before an altar. No narratives, no objects, just raw emotion communicated through color. Editor: Okay, I'm seeing more now. Thinking about Yves Klein and that radical blueness as almost a portal. And now I'm imagining how this big canvas of a hue changes with different light. That’s its power I believe, even a limited power. Curator: Definitely, it transforms constantly depending on when we stand before it. A monolith to modernity! Marioni doesn’t present us answers. Editor: I like that. Instead of being a riddle to be solved it asks, "What *do* you feel? And perhaps, what *should* you feel when confronted by such vast, intense beauty?" Curator: That is just what Marioni set out to make us all feel. I walk away from this more pensive. It hangs around in the memory for some time.