Mark Rothko: How Two Rectangles of Colour Make People Cry

There is a painter before whose works grown people cry for no reason they can name — Mark Rothko. His canvases hold almost nothing: two or three large fields of colour, soft edges, no subject. And yet they strike harder than many a crowded canvas. Rothko is close to me because he took to its limit something I say constantly: colour is not decoration but a state you can enter.

He refused to call himself an abstractionist. He said he was not interested in the relations of form and colour at all — he was interested in basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom. The rectangles were not the subject. They were the door.

What he saw

Rothko saw that colour and scale act on a person bodily, bypassing reason. He painted his canvases enormous on purpose — so that you would stand not “in front of a picture” but inside it, so that the field of colour would wrap the periphery of your vision and leave you nowhere to retreat. He asked for his works to be hung low and close, for the light to be dimmed. He was building not an image but a space in which something happens to you.

And he was right about the main thing: a strong experience needs no subject. You do not have to paint grief to summon grief — a true frequency of colour is enough, at a scale where you stop being an observer. Here I stand shoulder to shoulder with him. When I choose a colour, I do not ask “is it beautiful” — I ask where this colour will place you.

Where his model is not complete for me

But Rothko led the viewer in one direction — down. His colour darkened with the years, the fields went mute, and his last works are all but black gates, flung open onto emptiness. He went through them himself. His canvas honestly walked you to the edge of the abyss and left you standing on that edge.

I am not correcting him — it was his truth, paid for with his life, and I take my hat off. There is no ideal model, and his would not have become mine even if I agreed with every brushstroke. My map simply leads the other way. Rothko opened gates onto emptiness; I paint a portal out of which a soul is born. He left you facing the void; I try to leave you facing the light — not because I am afraid of the dark, but because for me love is a state in which something is created out of the emptiness, not dissolved in it. Colour can lead into the abyss, or it can open a door. I choose the door.

What this means for you

Honestly, with no promises: a canvas will not replace a therapist and will not cure anything. Crying in front of a painting is neither required nor useful in itself — I do not sell catharsis.

But what Rothko did, you know on your own skin. A room of one colour gathers you; a room of another presses down. The sky before a storm lands on your chest ahead of any thought. Colour is a frequency, and you feel it with your body. The only question is where the colours you live among are leading you — and who chose the route, you or chance.

And still

Rothko spent a life proving that two fields of colour can hold everything a human being is capable of, from ecstasy to doom. He stripped the subject from art and left pure experience. That was the courage of his century.

I propose taking that force one step further: not only walking you to the edge, but showing the way out. Let colour not only lay open — let it open. Look at the largest thing on your wall: where does it take you — down or forward? Rothko proved that colour decides this for you. I only want you to choose the direction yourself.

The work in question — “Inspiration” →

— Evgeny Fleysher