Kalle Hellzén: Colour Is Energy In Relationship (Artist, 257K Followers, Stockholm)

Kalle Hellzén Interview

Melancholy dipped in sunshine, that’s where ache and lift find their quiet harmony.

Q. You describe your work as 'melancholy dipped in sunshine.' Do you see this as a contradiction to wrestle with, or as the natural harmony your art always gravitates toward?

It is a harmony I keep returning to. Melancholy gives the work its weight, and light gives it air. I am not trying to resolve the two, because the work needs to hold both ache and hope, which is my experience of living.

Q. As a colorblind artist, you navigate the world differently from most. Do you feel this has, paradoxically, freed you to paint emotions rather than appearances?

Yes. My deutan vision pushes me to rely on contrast, structure, and the behaviour of light rather than conventional palettes. I do not try to reproduce what I think others see. I build something I feel, even if the chroma is unconventional.

Q. Your practice stretches across analogue, generative, and digital. When you move between these worlds, what do you feel changes more, the tools in your hands or the state of mind you’re in?

The loop matters more, from physical to generative to digital and back again. Each pass adds friction, accident, and clarity. I enter with curiosity, not certainty. The tools reveal paths I could not plan. It is the same state of mind, regardless of tool.

Q. Many of your works carry a quiet tension, as if they’re balancing fragility and permanence. Do you consider this tension intentional, or is it a mirror of your own inner landscapes?

The tension is the process, through layering, transfers, and modular assembly, things and materials that do not necessarily go together. It also mirrors life, suspended between falling apart and holding together. I try to keep that edge visible without forcing it into resolve.

Q. Your pieces often feel like they belong to two timelines at once, nostalgia and futurism. If your art were a bridge, what exactly would it be connecting?

Memory to possibility. I treat fragments of earlier works as living material, then invite new systems to recombine them. The bridge connects what shaped me to what might reshape me, so the viewer can cross in either direction.

Q. With your unique way of seeing, 'color' must mean something beyond pigment. What is your personal definition of color, stripped of the conventional spectrum?

Colour is energy in relationship. It is how light meets surface, how surface meets the eye, and how distance and texture bend perception.

Q. On social media, your work often arrives without lengthy explanations, inviting mystery. Do you feel explanation reduces the magic, or do you see silence itself as part of the artwork?

I try to give enough to orient, not to close the question. The work should meet the viewer where they are and still move after they leave.

Q. A playful one, if someone invented a pigment visible only to you, what name would you give it?

KHZ 5TO3. It would hum like a warm dark that still carries possibility and light.

Bio: 

Kalle Hellzén is a Stockholm based artist whose practice moves between analogue, generative, and digital processes. Beginning in oil painting and shaped by deutan colour blindness, his work explores the interplay of light, contrast, and structure. He often remixes fragments of earlier pieces, transferring printed pigment to boards, adding acrylic mediums, and returning the work to the machine in iterative cycles. He describes the emotional register of his work as “melancholy dipped in sunshine,” images that balance ache and lift.

Instagram

Interviewed by - Divya Darshni