Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

Colours on the Beach is connected to Karel Martens’ large-scale commission of the same name in Le Havre, France (2017), in which he devised a coded rhythm with which to paint the traditionally white beach cabins that form a distinct part of the Le Havre’s cityscape. One of those cabins is installed in the gallery for this exhibition. The artist writes: “For the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the city, I proposed the plan to give [the cabins] a colorful expression: stripes of 10 different colors and of 6 different width will be painted on the visible faces of the cabins. I see it as a kind of choreography, a composition of the whole panorama, with all the cabins. A unity through diversity.” The complex algorithmic composition, based on the city’s founding decree as written by King Francis I, was developed with researchers of the University of Le Havre’s Computing Laboratory of Information Processing and Systems (LITIS) and members of La Faironnerie, a lab which works on the link between science and art.