Robert Swain: The Form of Color is an immersive, site-specific exhibition grounded by the artist’s forty-five years of research into the phenomenology of color. The Form of Color is Swain’s first solo museum exhibition in California, and is comprised of interlocking, modular paintings created specifically for the Museum and the quality of light in Santa Monica. Each composition is made up of individual twelve by twelve inch squares of color, and measures up to seventy feet in length. The result is an all-encompassing visual and physical encounter—a journey into the sublime.

Robert Swain has devoted a lifetime to the study of color, and inspired generations of color painters in the process. As a young artist in the 1960s, he was influenced by the chromatic and compositional strategies of Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cezanne. Over the next four decades, Swain combined a modernist’s medium specificity with postmodern investments in both systems of knowledge and art as experience. The work on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is a massive network of pure paint, a comprehensive survey of the color system the artist began developing in 1973 with a research grant from the City University of New York. Swain’s color system is an index of 4,896 isolated chromatic units, along with accompanying records of their evocative properties. The multi-directional grids in the exhibition, plotted according to value and saturation, are designed to intensify collisions and complements among hues and induce specific visceral responses. In Swain’s system, such responses take place when an individual pigment’s radiant energy—a factor of its wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum—is transferred to the viewer.

“Color,” says Swain, “is a form of energy that stimulates our perceptual processes and is instrumental in conveying emotions.” Viewers of Swain’s work experience color as an active perceptual process, an event that happens in real time. Like multi-colored test patterns used to calibrate projectors and printers, Swain’s paintings reset and rejuvenate the human mind, eye, and body.