The Magician of Color (OESN)

Your sense of beauty

Refined beauty stands only on top of careful calculation. Your eye goes first to overflowing vivid color, or to the brilliance of a melody that flows pleasingly. But what you truly value is the perfect balance and technical finesse supporting that brilliance. You examine whether the placement of color against color, or the combination of instruments, has been designed to the millimeter. When raw earthiness is kept out of sight and a comfortable space has been made to captivate the viewer through skillful rules and polished craft, you feel genuine delight. You believe that the finest beauty lies inside refinement calculated through and through.

What moves you

Time spent watching an exquisite music box open, its complex gears meshing as a clear sound rings out. Or an hour with a painting in which cut paper shapes are combined in exactly the right places and the whole surface harmonizes as if dancing.

The beauty you tend to overlook

The flavor that lives in clumsy, untamed expression, far from calculation and polish. Try to feel the maker's warm vitality pulsing inside a misshapen form left plain and unadjusted.

The composer in tune with you: Maurice Ravel

Ravel calculated combinations of instrumental color and resonance with precision, finishing his works as structures without the slightest error. In Boléro he layers one and the same rhythm and melody over an exact calculation of volume. Stravinsky is said to have called him "a perfect Swiss watchmaker"; that craftsman's orchestration resonates deeply with your love of calculated refinement.

The painter who resonates with you: Henri Matisse

In his last years Matisse raised the cut-out — colored paper cut directly with scissors — into an independent form of expression, producing works such as the print portfolio Jazz (published 1947). He weighed the shape and placement of color exactly on the surface, creating a pleasing balance from which all unpleasantness had been removed. A method that produces vivid chromatic harmony through advanced calculation resonates with your sense of beauty.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: avoiding the exposure of harsh feeling, and constructing a perfect beauty that captivates the viewer through craftsmanlike calculation and techniques of their own.

Three paintings for you

Polynesia, the Sea

Henri Matisse