Reading the City Through Color

I don’t think of the city as something to be depicted.
I relate to it as something that has to be read.

This way of seeing did not come from architecture or urban theory. It emerged through literature and through color. Invisible Cities altered how I began to understand urban space — not as a collection of buildings, but as something held together by memory, desire, time, and residue. Kandinsky, working from an entirely different position, helped clarify how color can exist independently of what is seen: as a language shaped by inner necessity rather than representation.

My work takes shape where these two ways of thinking meet.

In my paintings, the city appears as a surface — one that carries the marks left by experience. The aim is neither documentation nor architectural accuracy. Streets, windows, houses, and fragments of nature are present, but they are not anchored to a specific location. They operate as points of contact: places where memory, perception, and lived experience intersect. What draws my attention is rarely the city as a whole. It is found instead at the edges — where light brushes against a wall, where a window interrupts a surface, where a subtle chromatic shift slightly destabilizes space.

Color, in this context, is not decorative. It does not describe reality or attempt to refine it. Informed by Kandinsky’s understanding of color as a force with psychological and spiritual weight, I approach color as something active — something that interferes with how space is perceived. Color absorbs time. It carries memory. It introduces tension. Rather than illustrating the city, it reconstructs it through relationships that remain unstable.

Certain forms recur: houses, streets, vertical structures, traces of vegetation. Yet they never return unchanged. Repetition functions here as a method, not as a motif. I use it to observe how meaning shifts when the same form is placed under different chromatic conditions. Each return slightly alters the reading. Each variation leaves something unresolved.

This sense of incompleteness is not something I try to resolve. Cities that resist closure — spaces that feel provisional, unstable, suspended between states — remain central to the way I work. Migration intensifies this awareness. Moving between places exposes how fragile familiarity can be, and how belonging is often negotiated rather than given. Under these conditions, the city no longer operates as a fixed environment. It becomes a process, continuously rebuilt through perception.

In Invisible Cities, Calvino describes cities that do not explain themselves. They do not narrate their histories; they carry them. Memory appears as traces, scratches, and residues embedded in space. This understanding closely aligns with what painting can do here: not storytelling, but reading what has already been inscribed — and translating that reading into color.

Painting, for me, becomes an act of reconstruction rather than representation. It allows engagement with urban space without fixing its meaning. The presence of the human figure is selective rather than constant. Human presence often remains indirect — through scale, rhythm, repetition, and chromatic tension. The city holds what has passed through it, along with what has been left behind.

These works do not seek to define the city. They approach it as a relational space — readable rather than depictable — where meaning remains provisional, and where the city can be continuously reassembled through color.

— Tara Haghi