Colour feast

I overdosed on colour at the Wayne Thiebaud exhibition at Faggionato in Mayfair. Most famous, perhaps, for his Pop Art paintings of cupcakes, candy apples and lemon meringue pies during the 1960s, the 80-something American painter has turned his sweet and feisty attention to the landscapes around his Sacramento River Valley home. The result is a veritable feast of colour - pumpkin orange, cobalt blue, lilac purple, olive green and blood red - that made me think, by turns, of Hieronymus Bosch, Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney, Wender's Paris Texas, Kar-Wai's 2046 and sari shops in India.

The glorious colour gluttony continued in Soho where the Riflemaker's Colour My World show mixes John Maeda's computer art, Bridget Riley's elongated triangles, David Hockney's cubist splashes, Matthew Meadow's decorative wallpaper, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, David Batchelor's lightboxes and more to explore the importance of colour for its own sake in a variety of art forms.

There's so much faux-intellectualisation of modern art these days that heartfelt, instinctive, emotional responses to it have been sidelined or even invalidated. So much research has been produced to show how colour brightness and saturation have strong effects on emotions and yet, in the contemporary art world, to experience and then discuss an artwork - a film, a painted canvas, an installation - on a sensual and visceral level is just not considered acceptable.

So I really liked what the Riflemaker had to say about it in their exhibition notes:

"Many people find the idea of colour too unexceptional and familiar to take seriously as something that art could be about. In fact colour is a liberator ... It releases you from cliches and moralising."

Colour was also on the menu when we returned to eat at the Korean restaurant Bi Won: chilli-red pickled cabbage, pink king prawn in the seafood soup, creamy rice, green spring onions and white tofu in the pork stew, and amber jasmine tea. Bi Won really is a great little place to eat.