The Felix Gärtner Color System

(2018)

 

Whether you are looking for color inspo for a new wrap on your Lambo, the ideal shade of brown for your first wig, or you simply need to stay on top of the color game, as a world leading designer – The Felix Gärtner Color System has you covered. This is the lit alternative to the rather lame and outdated color spaces like Pantone.

Whether you are looking for color inspo for a new wrap on your Lambo, the ideal shade of brown for your first wig, or you simply need to stay on top of the color game, as a world leading designer – The Felix Gärtner Color System has you covered. This is the lit alternative to the rather lame and outdated color spaces like Pantone.
At its core, The Felix Gärtner Color System seeks to convey and illustrate the (sometimes frustrating?) ‘task’ of processing the endless stream of visual information we are exposed to – while trying to spot AI deepfakes and making sense of it all.

The Felix Gärtner Color System can be seen as an evolution of the artist’s earlier work, Almost There (2015–2017). Both works are composed of screenshots captured during online image searches on Google. These screenshots seize a fleeting moment – virtually imperceptible with modern internet speeds – during which each image is represented by a single algorithm-generated color field, just before the actual search results are displayed as thumbnails.

In Almost There, the arrangement of the color fields inside the frame of the screenshot and the colors itself, reflect the initial search term. The project concluded in 2017 when Google’s interface changed, adding captions beneath each image. This newly introduced contrast – between descriptive text and the heavily simplified visual representation of the search term – served as the foundation for The Felix Gärtner Color System. It consists of six panels, wich are collages of screenshots of single color fields and their caption.

The content for Gärtner’s work is drawn from the seemingly infinite, constantly evolving digital realm – the largest repository of modern information, the internet. Meaning that theoretically, this color system could expand and be ‘updated’ indefinitely, with each of the two billion images uploaded to the web daily, introducing new color-text combinations.

The Felix Gärtner Color System explores the disruption of visual and esthetic harmony – the seemingly systematic order unravels as soon as the viewer starts reading the ‘names’ of the colors. The more they read, the more profound the level of disruption gets, as each color field is a hand-picked fragment of the vast pool of unfiltered content that permeates our daily lives across various media. Gärtner forces elements of pop culture and social media to collide with some of the most pressing issues facing society today.
On a lighter note, it also serves as a great conversation starter. Consider these examples: “Have you noticed we painted the facade in ‘Where Did Miley Cyrus Get Those Boobs?’” or “I wish the iPhone XR came in a shade like ‘Blue – Wikipedia.'”