Olga Alexopoulou on painting with light
April 22, 2025
4 min read
How one artist is revolutionizing pigments and dyes through the power of quantum dots.
Written by Laura Beeston
Illustrations by Rahmad Kurniawan
From antiquity to nanotechnology, blue is a throughline for painter and tech entrepreneur Olga Alexopoulou. This hue propelled her to travel the world exploring its history. And it’s a color she used to make history herself developing quantum pigments, which will likely define the next era.
From her home in Istanbul, Turkey, the co-founder of Quantum Light explained that this story actually starts 64,000 years ago, with cave painting, as pigments are intrinsic to the earliest expression of human experience.
Blue also has a fascinating backstory. From ancient kilns and ‘blue flower’ porcelain in China, to Medieval alchemists who stumbled upon Prussian blue when looking for the ‘elixir of life,’ to Yves Klein Blue in 2009… this is a color that has driven exploration across time.
“Blue comes up as a favorite around the world, even though different cultures assign different meanings to it,” Alexopoulou explained, after recounting its past. “In my career as a painter, I was always drawn to it.”
And eventually, this journey led her to create Quantum Blue with a small team of nanotechnology scientists. The rest, as they say, is history.
Art + nanotechnology = quantum pigments
To truly understand the potential of this leap for pigment technology, one must appreciate the power of quantum dots — man-made semiconductor crystals that are roughly the size of a water molecule.
These nanocrystals absorb photons (light) and re-emit them on a certain wavelength, due to quantum confinement; and this can be manipulated.
Quantum pigments are engineered with nanocrystals that can “play between the invisible and visible parts of the spectrum of light,” explained Alexopoulou.
This gives the pigments completely different optical behaviors: their emission is brighter, purer, and ‘illuminant independent’ — meaning the color doesn’t change with the light of their surrounding environment.
She describes quantum pigments as “a very quirky and dynamic palette” that follow the principles of light.
“It sounds a bit like a cult when I say that, but it’s the truth,” she chuckles, “since we’re mixing emitted photons, of course [the pigments] follow the principles of light.”
Recreating the blue hour
Alexopoulou first heard of quantum dots while giving a lecture at the University of Michigan and couldn’t believe that the crystals had not yet been used by artists.
Inspired by the blue hour, which occurs at the twilight of dusk or dawn, in her native Athens, Greece (and elsewhere), she wondered: Could this light be turned into a pigment through harnessing quantum confinement?
In 2016, she submitted a proposal to explore the potential of quantum dots in art to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — the place where plutonium, dark energy, and the acceleration of the universe was first discovered.
Alexopoulou’s idea was quickly taken on by Professor Paul Alivisatos, a pioneer in nanomaterials development. By 2018, she created a whole new blue and moved the project to Silicon Valley, where the exploration for other quantum shades and hues is ongoing.
Pigments at the dawn of perception
As Quantum Light expanded from blue to other colors, they invented a whole new class of pigments with unique properties.
Quantum Black, for instance, is a pigment that emits light on the non-visible part of the spectrum with a tail-end emission in the red, resulting in a black with a mysterious red glow.
You cannot make this [glow] with conventional pigments,” said Alexopoulou. “The red that comes through is where our vision starts, it is essentially the dawn of our perception.”
And now that this vantage point is open, they will continue to create pigments with tail ends in all kinds of other colours. Quantum Black offers the first step into an era of pigments that haven’t been seen before.
Rewriting color theory
Since quantum dots follow the principles of light, their pigments do not abide by traditional rules of color theory. “They mix like light mixes, they don’t mix like normal pigments,” Alexopoulou explained.
When her team blended red and green quantum dots together, for instance, it created yellow — whereas an artist using regular oil or acrylic paints would wind up with brown.
This is completely counterintuitive… It revolutionizes the palette! Your whole life, you used red and green [to make] brown but now it creates a really bright yellow.”
Her team went further by overpopulating a pigment with green quantum dots, which made the quantum dots appear to be “miserable.”
“They started eating up their own light and it created this bizarre, intense matte yellow,” Alexopoulou said with a laugh. “You could see that they were not happy.”
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Quantum: the next leap in art history
For her part, Alexopoulou is eager to get these pigments onto market and into the hands of artists, hopefully within the next two years.
Quantum Light is building an ecosystem of partners at the top of their fields in the meantime, in spaces like fashion and fabrics, general dyes, consumer products, and automotive coatings.
The aim is to create “a bridge between the quantum world and the pigment world to deliver products specifically for each application.”
A painter at heart, Alexopoulou is excited to see what artists make of this: “You can only imagine how much exploration there is to be done,” she said. “It’s like giving a box of oil paints to someone 600 years ago and saying, ‘Try it out.’”
With a reverence for the history of pigments and their influence on art movements — from egg tempera, to oils, to acrylics, and now quantum — Alexopoulou has her eyes set firmly towards the future.
“Where we are right now is at the very beginning,” she said. “Once they are out and artists start using them, who knows where that will take it.”
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