Cool, Mild, Pure, Warm by Max Schulze

Publisher: Archiv Untergrund, Düsseldorf, 2018

Format: Softcover, 29.7 × 21 cm

Edition: 500 copies

Pages: 32

Text: Joshua Groß

In Cool, Mild, Pure, Warm, Max Schulze takes the commercial logic of colour systems into the street. Starting from Schöner Wohnen’s consumer palette of 864 shades—organised into the emotional categories Cool, Mild, Pure and Warm—Schulze pairs colour charts with photographs of paint attacks and traces of colour found in public space. Mounted against painted ingrain wallpaper, these collisions turn domestic promises of taste, identity and lifestyle into something unstable and potentially subversive. Moving between painting, vandalism, political gesture and the market language of “zombie formalism,” the publication asks where painting can still take place and whether colour can retain any disruptive force once it escapes the canvas. With a text by writer Joshua Groß.