Pink Doesn’t Exist Pink Doesn’t Exist
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Illustration: Joanna Grochocka
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Pink Doesn’t Exist

Szymon Drobniak
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time 11 minutes

This color is a little like the famous pipe in René Magritte’s picture: it somehow exists, but still it doesn’t. Makes sense, right?

In the 1980s, a football coach at the University of Iowa had a brilliant idea. He ordered the walls of the visiting team’s locker room to be painted pink. The decor, he must have thought, would be a type of psychological pressure on completely unsuspecting opponents. Pink, a color culturally associated at the time with femininity and delicacy, was meant to undermine visitors’ self-confidence and their feeling of physical superiority. In 2005, the university went one step further during a large renovation project, painting the sinks, toilets and showers pink as well. While this did in fact cause many controversies—critics accused the academic decision-makers of trampling on the principles of equality and social justice—the protests didn’t go anywhere, and the locker rooms stayed pink.

The Iowa football players weren’t the first to try psychological tricks using color-based persuasion. In the 1970s similar attempts—also with pink in the starring role—were made by the American researcher Alexander Schauss. Based on his conviction that color has a key significance in regulating human emotions and temperament, in 1979 Schauss got several cells in a penal institution in Seattle painted in a hue we could describe as flamingo pink. The concept was born out of research indicating a reduction in both muscle tension and the general level of aggression in people exposed to a certain hue of pink. Tests

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A Fictional Autobiography A Fictional Autobiography
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A Fictional Autobiography

Rinus Van de Velde

Rinus Van de Velde is a Belgian artist whose work spans a range of media, though he is best known for his large-scale narrative drawings. Each features a handwritten caption of one of his musings, which are often witty or existential in nature. While the charcoal drawings often depict him as a central figure, the majority of his colorful oil pastel works only insinuate a human presence.  

Though Van de Velde’s work reads as plein air, he has never been to the places in his drawings and instead imagines them from the confines of his studio. At times the works take the form of letters to other artists, and he is often in dialogue with the likes of Matisse, Monet, Hockney, and Doig. With his drawings, he has created a fantasy life for himself of the places he wishes to have seen and the life he wishes to have lived. The images presented here feature work from his most recent shows at Max Hetzler in Paris and Tim Van Laere in Rome.

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