The limited edition Blue Rubrics (WHO NEEDS WORDS), 2018 was produced by William Kentridge as an edition of 45 in support of Tate. Each work is signed and numbered by the artist.
The Blue Rubrics series began when Kentridge received a gift of pure lapis lazuli gouache from Afghanistan. In order to find a use for the vivid blue pigment he addressed it in terms of its specific colour and material eventually mixing it into ink to overlay silkscreen prints.
Kentridge notes:
'They are called Blue Rubrics, but a rubric really should be red – a rubric was the printed or illuminated red text in a liturgical manuscript, in which the black ink would have been the text of the liturgy and the red would have been instructions on how to pray. So they are footnotes to a thought, the edges of the thought. In my case they are unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense...WHO NEEDS WORDS (the whispering in the leaves)…. these are fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years, which get taken out and sorted through on occasions.
Of course it is always a double text, layering both the phrase which I have silkscreened on top, and the text on the page below, which we glimpse through the blue phrase, and which sometimes coincidentally has a connection to the phrase on top; but each print uses a different page from the book, so each one has a marginal difference'
More