Elizabeth Newman, Untitled (2018)

This text painting by Elizabeth Newman quotes Freud, who, in a short paper from 1924 on “Neurosis and Psychosis,” suggests that the new systemisation of the mental apparatus he had proposed the year before in The Ego and the Id might allow us to “see what we already know from another angle” and, in this, “bring with it a profitable return from grey theory to the perpetual green of experience.” Freud was himself alluding to a passage from the first part of Goethe’s Faust, which complicates the metaphor with a third colour, contrasting the grey of theory to the “green of life’s golden tree.” Speaking to Helen Hughes and me in an interview in January 2023, Lizzy explained that, to her, the phrase named “the mass of reality” that can never be captured by the symbolic, seeing this both as linked to nature — “verdant and growing” — and as a commentary on art: “it refers to colour, to experience as opposed to representation.”