A vast installation of pigments applied directly on the floor covering a surface of 200 square meters at the gallery of the Venet Foundation in Le Muy in the South of France. Thus the foundation celebrates its 5 years and 90 years since the birth of artist Yves Klein. In 1957 the artist held an exhibition at the Colette Allendy gallery called “Pigment Pur” (Pure Pigment) with an installation consisting only of blue pigments inside. The pigments were placed horizontally on the floor, the visitor could not walk on it. With this work, Yves Klein anticipated Carl Andre's sculpture work for 10 years and invented a new paradigm of the flat work of art that develops horizontally in space.

Pure pigment has been installed in other museums: the Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, the Center Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Wort, Hirschhorn Museum, and the Walker Art Center, but never in such an extensive space as the Venet Foundation. The pure pigment, the “Klein blue”, is a expanse that generates a mineral energy. This show is, according to Alexandre Devals, director of the Venet Foundation, “an essential marker in Klein’s approach to ‘the undefinable’ that Delacroix speaks of in his diary as being the only true ‘virtue of painting’." Klein, the director recalls, “regularly quotes Delacroix in his writings and this installation, this landscape running off into the distance, makes the rest of his work resonate to a great degree”. The artist wrote: “My monochrome propositions are the landscapes of freedom; I am an Impressionist and a disciple of Delacroix”.