Aside from being the rarest occurring colour in nature, blue is a lot of things. In English, it signifies sadness or melancholy. In German, to be blau is to be shit-faced: wholly intoxicated. In French, to rire bleu means to laugh in such a joyless, awkward manner that it feels forced. Across languages and ideologies, blue seems to share one pervasive quality: it signals states that are neither fully internal nor entirely external, existing at the threshold between affect and perception.
Aristotle recognised this: the sky and sea appear blue not because they carry the colour within them, but because distance, light, and air bend perception. Goethe called it a hue of retreat, a colour that recedes into infinity and pulls the imagination after it. Bachelard saw blue in interiority as a shade of longing that stretches beyond material bounds. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is not passive, and that colour emerges in the dialogue between body, gaze, and world. Across these reflections, blue remains unfixed. It lingers at the edge between presence and absence, perception and imagination, alive only in the space separating what is here from what remains out of reach.
Using Rebecca Solnit’s essay The Blue of Distance (1992) as a conceptual anchor, the exhibition of the same name at Berlin’s Setareh gallery gestures toward these ideas, yet its ambitions unfold unevenly. The main space greets visitors with a series of “nice” pictures of nice subjects: pastel-hued compositions, watercolor sensibilities, delicate gestures of charm and whimsy. They have a kind of pixie-dust prettiness, a visual amiability that can charm the eye but rarely holds it. Colour and line are enlisted more for mood than for perception, and the sense of distance — the very element Solnit renders essential— is treated as a generalised sentiment rather than a tangible, spatial or material condition. The works hover in a kind of gentle limbo: pleasant to look at, but conceptually adrift, leaving the gallery’s ambitions suspended somewhere between idea and affect.
Solnit’s essay transforms a simple optical phenomenon into a meditation on desire, longing, and the impossibility of arrival (so perhaps the pastel prettiness of the main gallery does capture some trace of that feeling, though likely not in the way Solnit intended). She notes that mountains appear blue not because of pigment but because of the atmosphere between viewer and horizon; the colour is generated by distance itself. From this, she draws a reflection on perception and affect: blue emerges in the tension between what is seen and what recedes beyond reach. Approach the horizon, and it vanishes. In Solnit’s view, blue is never fixed; it lives in the interplay of observer, landscape, and atmosphere, where distance shapes desire and perception itself produces feeling.
Tucked away from the main gallery, Margate-based artist Elizaveta Zalieva’s work quietly rescues the exhibition. The most compelling pieces are also the hardest to find: visitors must thread through a narrow corridor, which could easily have been missed had it not been for a printed list of works. In this hidden space, Zalieva’s installations assert themselves with understated authority, transforming absence into structure, relational space into perception, and making blue — the horizon Solnit describes — feel almost tangible.
Zalieva’s works negotiate a delicate balance between abstraction and specificity. Space and absence generate the blue at the heart of her practice, yet these qualities are anchored in objects that carry memory, myth, and traces of the everyday. Ordinary forms assemble into constellations where narrative, historical reference, and associative logic intertwine. The effect is precise yet elusive.
This negotiation between abstraction and specificity finds echoes in broader critical frameworks. Zalieva’s approach recalls Rosalind Krauss’s notion of the “expanded field” of sculpture, where objects gain meaning through their relationships rather than material presence alone, and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, in which images, objects, and traces of memory circulate through contingent networks of association. In her hands, blue is never literal; it arises from relational tension, from the spaces between objects, narratives, and perception. She does not paint the colour but constructs the conditions in which it emerges, letting perception itself do the work.
While many of the other works hover in a generalised mood, Zalieva’s pieces enact relationality, perception, and spatial logic: without them, the show feels like a catalogue of sentiment rather than a sustained engagement with the conceptual stakes of Solnit’s essay.
Ultimately, it is Zalieva’s work that gives The Blue of Distance its conceptual coherence. Her installations embody relational tension, perceptual nuance, and the ethical subtlety that Solnit traces in blue. The other pieces, while often visually appealing, operate through generalised mood or metaphor, leaving the essay’s central insight largely unexamined. In Zalieva’s room — where distance, perception, and relationality intersect — the exhibition comes fully into focus, showing how careful attention to space, objects, and experience can not only interrogate a concept but also open new conceptual terrain.
The Blue of Distance
07.03–17.04.2026
Setareh Gallery
Schöneberger Ufer 71
10785 Berlin
