This is an area that hasn’t been treated yet.
So you’ll notice that the restoration appears a bit lighter than the surrounding original
paint
and it’s sort of filling in the original paint-roller texture.
You’ll notice that the paint-roller creates this very sharp impasto texture and the restoration
is a bit chalky and fills in that texture.
Even though this restoration is ultramarine blue in polyvinyl acecetate resin just like
Klein’s original
because the texture is incorrect we are perceiving the color differently than the surrounding
area.
So my task is to first correct that texture and then correct the color.
The tools that I’m using come to us from the surgical field.
There are very few tools that are made just for conservation because conservation is a
sort of small field
so we borrow from other fields—often surgery or dentistry.
These tools are very, very small spoons with sharp edges that are used for corneal surgery.
These, unfortunately, I have to sharpen by hand as they dull because Klein’s paint
is much harder than a cornea, and so it doesn’t last quite as long as it would in a surgical environment.
Klein, to create his perfect matte blue surfaces, worked with a scientist in Paris to come up
with a mixture of ultramarine blue and polyvinyl acetate resin.
What I’m doing to do the color restoration portion of the treatment is actually sampling
original material from the back of the painting where the paint has sort of spilled over the
edge and onto the back to get the closest possible color for restoring the color on the front.
It’s sort of like a skin graft in a way—taking material from another place and using it on the front.
But it is the only way we’ve found to get exactly the color that we need.
Even using exactly the correct pigment in exactly the correct resin, it’s very difficult
to get the color match, so using the original material is the closest that we can get.
I’m sampling the paint dry and then using ethyl acetate to redissolve the paint.
When the paint goes onto the surface it has to dry at exactly the correct rate to get
the right color.
And then after the paint has been applied, you’ll notice that there’s an overall
sort of burnished look in some areas of the painting, so there’s actually a fine refining
of the texture after the paint goes on to get that sort of burnished look which gets…
you’ll notice that when the paint goes on it’s a little bit darker and then when I
go in and refine the texture even further, then the color corrects.
So the burnished surface allows the light to reflect off of these restored areas in
the same way that it reflects off the surrounding areas so that it blends more completely
no matter what angle the viewer is approaching the painting from.