ELIA NEDKOV on The role of colour

“For me the colours must always be pastels, sober and calm. I rarely put strong colours on the walls and when it happens I do it only to give an accent. I often compare rooms and walls to an orchestra. When you go to a concert, if you listen to a soloist and the orchestra is in the background everything is fine, but if at a certain point you listen to five, ten, twenty soloists… Then there is the risk of not understanding anything anymore. In the same way, I find that a decorator or even an architect falls into error when he persists in producing too many effects on the walls of an environment. Creating too many accents, too many soloists.

Instead, I set a new background and calibrate the accent well. When I insert it I want it to make sense, it has to say something. Sometimes it happens that the accent is not a colour but the person who lives in space, ourselves. Often in space I want to be the one that has the possibility to develop. This is why I find that a beige or white or grey wall, in reality, can in many cases be much more significant than a red one.”

Elia Nedkov is an Art Director, Designer, & Architect based in Milan, Italy.

This is an excerpt from an Interview with Elia Nedkov conducted by Viero Paints in October 2018. It has been translated from Italian. Read the full transcript here.