Excerpt from AN ARTIST'S THOUGHTS ON THE ROLE OF COLOR IN CONTEMPORARY ART (1998) by Peter Halley

For me, this is an ideal period for an artist to be involved in issues of color. Technology is offering up increasingly spectacular coloristic effects in film, television, and on the computer screen.  New intensely colored materials are entering architecture and industrial design.  Advertising has transformed every corner of our environment into garish but enticing coloristic vignettes.  This coloristic intensity of our built environment leaves me bewildered that color has not become a central theme in the work of other artists.

There is another issue that I have been exploring for many years in my work - the increasing importance of color as a mapping or coding device in our culture.  It is my belief that, as our cognitive world becomes more and more two-dimensional as a result of computers and other technology, color plays an ever more central role in coding this two-dimensional world.  This is a subject that has yet to be widely addressed.  I would even speculate that the use of color in traditional societies and in the historical West, which we usually interpret as expressive, may have just as much to do with this coding function - for example, in the way different tribes or opposing armies color-coded their clothing to identify themselves.

Finally, in ending this essay, I will return to the idea of the universality of the appeal of color,  the question that so interested the Structuralists.  In terms of my own practice, I must say that I am often surprised and pleased by the appeal that my rather esoteric paintings sometimes have for people untrained in art, who come from different countries and from different classes.  Perhaps in our current preoccupation with the sociopolitical contingency of all cultural response, we have too hastily thrown out the Structuralist baby with the bathwater.