Materialising Colour: Journeys With Giulio Ridolfo

A good book, a true book, is a brave one. It comes alone. Such is Materialising Colour, a brilliant new title, from Phaidon, presenting the color sense, the color history and philosophy of Giulio Ridolfo. Ridolfo is perhaps the most acclaimed design colourist in the world - it is not every table that might even know what that could mean. He is a metaphysic to color, an anthropologist to color, an explorer and historian and botanist to color. He sees colour as music, as a garden, as a story, as a context, as a moment in time, as a food and physic. He is the doctor that you call when you must have the colour be perfect. The famous Danish textile company Kvadrat has taken his work to the heart of their production. To Ridolfo, colour is the breath of the land, of the seasons and the soil and the water and the light - and that is the breadth of this book. Traveling from Friuli, his home in Northern Italy, to quarries and the Scandinavian sea, to Denmark and India, he hunts, almost as a forager, for the intimate conditions of colour. It is the long way, the complicated, long way to the soul of things. This is such a book.