YeZhang
Gary hume uses modern, unnatural, evanescent colours and the aluminium panels under the paint are also of a particular sheen, which from the materials and colours will make the viewer feel cold and uneasy. Through the opaque paint, which produces reflections, the viewer can enter the picture and penetrate deep into the surface of things.
The Door Paintings recall a work by Sigmar Polke called Schrank, painted in 1963. Schrank, with its central, Newmanesque vertical zip and funny little keyholes to either side, more resembled the doors to a cupboard than the door to an institutional room or to the outside world. Schrank is a painting which has me fumbling in my pockets for a key each time I look at a reproduction of it, whereas Hume's doors have precisely the opposite effect. Curiosity about what lies on
the other side of the door is tempered by the certainty that behind the painted door there is only a wall. Is it possible to think of a door and not think about where it leads to? The door was closed, and looked, too, like yet another figuration of modernism’s closure, even painting’s closure.（p11）
The paintings from his series of works for The Door show how he made sense of colour.
Artists' colours are connected to the palette; the palette is connected to colour mixture; colour mixture is connected to colour theory;
colour theory is connected to the colour circle. The colour circle has dominated the understanding and the use of colour in art. Based on a geometry of triangulation and a grammar of complementarity, the colour circle establishes relationships between colours, and also implies an almost feudal hierarchy among colours-primaries, secondaries and tertiaries; the pure and the less pure. The colour chart offers an escape from all that. It is, in effect, simply a list; a grammarless accumulation of discrete colour units. In the colour chart, every colour is equivalent to and independent of every other colour. There are no hierarchies, only isolated colour events. The colour chart divorces colour from conventional colour theory and turns every colour into a readymade. It promises autonomy for colour; in fact it offers three distinct but related types of autonomy the autonomy of each colour from every other colour, the autonomy of colour from the dictates of colour theory, and the autonomy of colour from the register of representation.（p25）
I could only find 2 or 3 colours in the doors, and sometimes he would combine the doors to appear in more colours, hard, relentless, glossy colours that were the complete opposite of traditional painting. Such colours also bring more depth to the presentation of the painting.