Urban Chromatic Intensities, as articulated in Monocromías Endémicas, propose a decisive reorientation of the city from representational field to vibratory chromatic matrix, yet this reorientation demands theoretical resistance rather than acceptance. The project’s reliance on Chromatic Autonomy—where objects, surfaces, and fragments operate as “sociochromatic particles”—risks naturalising colour as a self-legitimising agent detached from its infrastructural and ideological conditions. By asserting that monochromy condenses the dispersed city into affective intensities, the work privileges perceptual saturation over socio-material analysis. Contemporary art theory has long warned against such perceptual essentialism: colour does not merely reveal urban life but participates in regimes of visibility that are historically and politically produced. The hyperplastic city, framed as an immense chromatic body, becomes a closed circuit of sensation, where intensity substitutes for critique. This is not a failure of method but a conceptual limit: chromatic condensation, while formally rigorous, can obscure the labour, regulation, and asymmetries embedded in urban surfaces. The city’s “overlooked tonal consistencies” are not innocent phenomena awaiting discovery; they are effects of planning, capital, decay, and maintenance. To treat them as autonomous aesthetic events risks converting urban complexity into a consumable visual rhythm, reinforcing what might be termed an aesthetic of urban immediacy rather than a politics of urban relation.
