Between perception, emotion and imagination
Some colours hold our gaze before it begins to look for a form. A deep blue, a yellow that seems to retain light, a red emerging from the dark matter of a painting. We do not always know why they make us pause. Sometimes they remind us of something; at other times, we feel that they are leading us towards a place we have never seen.
What happens in this encounter between colour and the gaze? How much belongs to the image, and how much to the person looking at it?
Research into perception shows us that vision is a complex process. Philosophy and poetry, in turn, invite us to ask what becomes of what we see when it enters our inner world. Between these perspectives, a space opens in which colour can be understood both as a perceptual experience and as a possibility for the imagination.
When we look at a painting, we have the impression that we see the colours as they are on the canvas. Yet our experience depends on many relationships: the light falling on the work, the neighbouring colours, the contrasts, the painted matter and the place towards which our attention is directed.
A shade never appears entirely on its own. The same blue may seem brighter beside a dark colour or more restrained next to a very intense one. One surface may appear to come forward, while another recedes into the depth of the image. The eye gradually discovers these relationships as it moves from one part of the work to another.
A study published in 2025 by Ichiro Kuriki and his colleagues helps us better understand how what we do when looking at a colour is reflected in brain activity. The researchers presented participants with the same coloured stimuli, asking them, under different conditions, to direct their attention towards different aspects of their perception.
In one situation, participants evaluated the appearance of the colour: the shade they perceived and its variations. In another, their task was to place the colour in a chromatic category. The difference can be understood in this way: we can observe a shade between blue and green, attending to how the two colours meet within it; but we can also try to decide whether we consider it “blue” or “green”. The researchers compared these two situations with a third, in which participants’ attention was directed towards a task other than evaluating the colour.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they observed that patterns of activity in visual areas changed according to the task being performed, although the coloured stimuli were the same. The differences between judging a colour’s appearance and placing it in a category were more pronounced in certain visual regions further along the pathway of information processing. The findings suggest that how we approach a colour — as a shade to observe or as a member of a category — plays a part in how chromatic information is represented in the brain.
The experiment does not reproduce the experience of looking at a painting, nor does it tell us what a viewer feels in front of a work. It does, however, show that the same visual information can be processed differently depending on what we are trying to do. In front of a painting, we may try to recognise a form, allow ourselves to be drawn to a particular shade, or follow its relationship with the rest of the image. Each time, the gaze finds a different path.
Over time, people have tried to give colours precise meanings: red as the colour of passion, blue of calm, yellow of joy. These associations are familiar and sometimes help us speak about what we feel. But the way we experience colour cannot be contained within a few fixed associations.
A major review published in 2025 by researchers Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr brought together the findings of 132 articles on the relationship between colour and emotion. The authors found certain recurring associations: yellow and orange, for example, were often associated with positive, intense emotions, while blue and green were associated with calmer positive emotions. Red, by contrast, was associated with both positive and negative emotions, often intense ones.
The researchers nevertheless point to an important distinction: associating a colour with an emotion does not necessarily mean experiencing that emotion when looking at it. If someone says that blue suggests calm to them, we cannot conclude that every image containing blue will make them feel calm. Their response may differ according to the shade, the other colours in the image, the context and their own experience.
In front of a work of art, colour never appears as an isolated sign. A red can be violent or tender, seem near or distant, hold the gaze or lead it onwards. Its brightness, the material in which it is placed and its relationship with the other colours change the way we encounter it.
Perhaps it is this openness that makes colour so alive in painting. It can suggest a state without naming it and acquire a different meaning for each viewer.
In La Poétique de l’espace, Gaston Bachelard seeks to understand how poetic images touch us and open possibilities for the imagination. Although much of his book is devoted to intimate spaces — the house, the room, the nest, the shell — in its introduction he also turns to painting.
Writing about the work of Georges Rouault, Bachelard speaks of an inner light that is not simply a reflection of light from the outside world. To enter the painter’s world, the viewer is invited to participate in this light and in the inner intensity of colour.
From this perspective, colour is no longer merely a visible property of an object. It becomes part of the expression of a sensibility. A red is not simply a shade we can identify; in Rouault’s painting, it can carry an intensity that arises from the work as a whole.
Bachelard is not offering an explanation of how the brain works. He is trying to describe an experience of the image, an encounter in which the viewer is invited to participate. Scientific research and philosophical reflection begin with different questions: the first seeks to observe and measure certain processes of perception; the second tries to understand how the image is experienced and imagined. Considered together, they help us see how rich the experience of a colour can be.
For Bachelard, the spaces in which we live cannot be reduced to their dimensions. A room can hold the memory of a presence; a corner can become a place of retreat; a house that has disappeared can continue to exist in daydreams. Lived space thus acquires values that geometry alone cannot describe.
Starting from this idea, we may ask whether a painting, too, can become a kind of inner space for the person looking at it.
The canvas has visible boundaries. Yet within them, the eye can discover nearness and distance, thresholds, openings, places where it pauses and others where it is invited to move onwards. These places do not have to represent a room or a landscape. They can emerge from the meeting of colours, the layering of paint, or a light that seems to come from beyond the surface.
In abstract painting, space is not always constructed to be recognised. It can be felt before it is understood. The viewer is not necessarily trying to arrive somewhere; sometimes they remain before an area of colour and allow their gaze to grow accustomed to it gradually.
This connection between the space described by Bachelard and pictorial space allows us to see the painting as a place of encounter: an image created by the artist, which each viewer enters with their own sensibility.
One of Bachelard’s most beautiful chapters is entitled L’immensité intime — intimate immensity. The philosopher speaks of the immensity that opens up in daydreaming: an experience in which, without moving, we can feel space expanding.
This idea may help us approach a paradox of painting. How can a bounded surface give us the feeling of a vast space? How can a colour suggest a distance we cannot measure?
Perhaps the answer lies not only in what is represented. Sometimes an image opens us to more than it shows. A barely perceptible light, a form that dissolves into another, a colour that seems to continue beyond its edge can leave room for the imagination.
Bachelard offers us a way of speaking about this experience: about how a bounded image can awaken in us a sense of openness. Immensity should not be understood here as a measurable property of the painting, but as a possibility for the gaze and imagination of the person who encounters it.
No viewer comes before a work with an entirely new gaze. We carry places, lights, memories and images once seen, even when we cannot name them. A colour can bring something of this experience back: the light of a morning, a fragment of landscape, the atmosphere of a room.
But encountering a work cannot be reduced to recognition. An image can touch us without clearly reminding us of anything. It can bring together what we know and what we have never seen, opening an experience for which we do not yet have a name.
That is why two people can look at the same work and remain before it for different reasons. One may be drawn to the light of a colour, the other to its depth. One may feel a sense of closeness, the other discover a distance. The work remains the same, but the encounter with it changes.
Colour begins by being seen, but our experience of it does not end there. It enters into relationships with other colours, with attention, memory and imagination. It can become an atmosphere, suggest a space or allow an emotion to arise that we cannot immediately define.
Neuroscience helps us understand some of the processes involved in perception. Bachelard invites us to remain attentive to the inner life of images and to what they can open within us. Between these two perspectives, painting retains its freedom.
Perhaps this is one of its gifts: to offer us, within the limits of a surface, a place where the gaze can meet colour, and colour can become, for a moment, a space of our own.
