Klein's Blue, by way of a Coffee Table

The Yves Klein coffee table sits in my line of sight and I still lose myself in that blue. No photograph gets the depth right, only when you’re there in the moment can you really see the blue for what it really is. It shifts with the light, so the table never reads quite the same twice.

Klein created that blue in 1960, International Klein Blue he called it. The pigment was suspended in a resin binder that let the colour keep its full intensity instead of dulling. He spent a year chasing to get the colour perfect, working with Éduoard Adam, a Paris paint merchant. He wanted colour with nothing standing between you and it.

I’ve always preferred objects that refuse to be just one thing. This is a table, but its also a sculpture, an artwork, a fixed point in the room. Living with it means encountering art daily, not hanging it on a wall and forgetting it’s there.

Klein died at the age of thirty four, having spent nearly a decade dedicating to making his works, I think this is one of the pieces that outlasted him, still doing exactly what he intended, sixty years on.

A room full of single purpose objects gets busy fast. Once piece that does everything like holding your coffee, anchoring the space, carrying itself as art can keep things pared back and interesting without asking you to give anything up. That’s the kind of object with real longevity.

AE X