“ET IN ARCADIA EGO”-(I am also in Arcadia (I am)-: COLOR PROJECT FOR WAITING AREAS, 2nd BASEMENT FLOOR(-7.30m). GREGORIO MARAÑÓN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF ONCOLOGY. MADRID
The objective, in the Radiotherapy area of the Gregorio Marañon Hospital, is to reduce the tension load of fear and stress that patients present, due to the tests and treatments to which they are going to undergo. We propose the use of color, as a fundamental element to collaborate in the effectiveness of treatments.
To do this, we propose a color intervention that evokes in patients and family members other scenarios that we will call therapeutic. We talk about “Transforming Reality.”
Through this performance, we intend that users, based on games of color and light, of rhythms and volumes, move to distant and different scenarios. We base ourselves on the environments created by the painter Sorolla in his painting «The boy in the little boat», which transports us to the beaches of Valencia and recreates, thanks to the children’s bath, a moment of full happiness and joy.
Based on the concept of Virgil’s Arcadia (S. I ac), we return to the version proposed by the 19th century painters, locating Arcadia on the shores of the Mediterranean, as a place to return to, a refuge and security. We designed the meaning of “I, in Arcadia”, as a stay in a place far from the hospital basements, transforming the surrounding reality, recreating the shores of the Mediterranean as that idyllic and timeless space. We join it to personal experiences, proposing beauty as an instant of brevity and recreating the hedonistic archetypal idea of the Mediterranean as a paradise of happiness. The painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is the reference for the intervention of color, for whom the Mediterranean is above all «intensity» that is characterized by the rigorous sunlight, the iridescent reflections of the water, the white of the foam, of boats, canvas and candles.
Solution: We materialize this idea using several resources:
THE LIGHT: We propose to regulate the existing project luminaires, towards a greater warmth that simulates the Mediterranean light. The warm atmosphere of the Mediterranean that appears in the painting will be recreated.
THE COLOUR: We start from Sorolla’s palette of his seas from “El niño de la barquita”, to recreate the tones of the Mediterranean: aquamarines and the greenish blues that appear on the plans.
RHYTHMS AND MOVEMENT: Geometrically, the sea can be understood as a series of horizontal iridescent stripes, broken by the whiteness of the foam of the waves, a succession of vibrant color frequencies between the whites that delimit them. We materialize the whole and make a turn: the horizontal becomes vertical, the bands are shortened, but they flood and monopolize the ceilings. The widths, lengths and rhythms of the bands generate a vibration and movement as if it were WAVES. A modular study of widths, lengths, shades of color that sometimes start from the gray base and other times come off, to «move» and escape to that horizon line. And they penetrate inconstantly into the ceilings «revolving» and creating a refuge for the patient, a wave that tries to surround him as if protecting him. Therefore, rhythms, color, vibration and the lights of the Mediterranean regulated by means of the ambient lighting of the Reforma project, evoke the environments of the Mediterranean, of the paintings on the beaches of Jávea and Valencia, some «therapeutic» environments thanks to the ability to evoke color.
