Time & Perspective Quote by Josef Albers

Albers is letting the studio secret slip: color is never a solitary fact, it is an event. “I count all the time on resonance” reads like a technician’s admission and a magician’s creed. He’s not talking about paint as pigment but paint as relationship, the way one square makes the next one blush, cool down, vibrate, or recede. In the Bauhaus-to-Black-Mountain lineage that shaped him, this is an anti-romantic manifesto: stop treating art as self-expression and start treating it as a set of conditions that produce perception.

The phrase “count all the time” matters. It’s disciplined, almost accountant-like, implying repetition, testing, and control. Albers’s great subject wasn’t color in the abstract; it was the viewer’s instability. His famous nested squares don’t “represent” anything, yet they can feel like heat, depth, even mood. That’s resonance: the optical afterimage, the perceived glow, the psychological charge that appears between surfaces. He’s banking on your eyes to complete the work, then quietly proving how unreliable those eyes are.

“I call on this, you see” is the sly pivot from authority to invitation. It sounds conversational, but it’s also pedagogical: you, the viewer, are being recruited into the experiment. Albers’s subtext is that meaning in modern art doesn’t have to be smuggled in via narrative or symbolism; it can be engineered through interaction. Resonance becomes both method and argument, a way to make sensation carry the weight that storytelling used to.