Featured artist
We dive into the history of colour with recent Rietveld Academy graduate
Miquel Hervás Gómez Text by Floor Kortman
Graphic designer Miquel Hervás Gómez graduated this summer from the Rietveld Academy with a big stack of A0 prints featuring a grid filled with a bunch of seemingly random, colourful images. We didn’t quite understand what was happening, but we were intrigued. We asked him to participate in this year’s edition of The Wrapping Paper Project – an art publication that doubles as wrapping paper featuring designs made by several artists. He delivered a most unconventional design that also needs some further explaining, so we took the bait and decided to investigate. For the past year, Miquel has dedicated his work to colour. He is fascinated by the perception and digital processing of colour. Within printing and photography, there is a complex and problematic history of colour perception. The standards for this were at one point set by Kodak, leading developer of photographic film in the late 20th century. One of the controversial items Kodak developed during that time were the Shirley cards, 46
used by photo labs to calibrate skin tones, shadows and light during the printing process. Shirley cards were always photographs of fancy white ladies, accompanied by the word ‘Normal’. That word was meant to imply the standard that each printing company should adhere to, but clearly, setting a white, fancy lady as the standard is problematic to say the least. The odd idea that we should all perceive colour the same way, or that there would be a ‘correct’ way to represent colour, was the starting point of the vast archive Miquel built during his investigative visual research. For this occasion, he revisits and re-appropriates images from said archive, together with his wrapping paper design, to show the many possible variations on the theme. What initially seemed a set of random objects is now revealed to be a deliberate collection, and his modern-day Shirley, a thoughtful comment on the perception of colour. — miquelhervas.com