subject sitting in darkened room

“Subject sitting in darkened space is told to watch a dot of light and draw a record of its movement on a paper. Dot is actually stationary. But to most normal people is seems to move around, describing a wandering, irregular track.” In a scientific experiment described in LIFE magazine of 22 October 1956 in a article titled “New avenues into sick minds” scientists found that so-called “normal” people reacted differently to a source of light when sitting in a dark room than schizophrenic patients. The use of chemical drugs had just recently been pioneered in mental hospitals and changed the perception of mental illness. Experiments as the one described tantalized the scientists’ hope that “mental sickness may involve measurable body chemistry as much as it does elusive psychic phenomena.”

This exhibition is a study of the color black. And similar to the experiment of a subject sitting in darkened room, told to watch a dot of light, it starts with the physical and chemical characteristics of the color black. Over the course of the exhibition, the symbolic nature of black will become more evident and move into the historical and political meaning of the color black. Throughout the exhibition, works will be exchanged to form new relationships and meanings with other works on view, and move from a focus on physical and chemical aspects of the color black to symbolic meanings, to study the historical and political connotation in a second exhibition, running from October 30 to December 19.

In the visible spectrum, black is the absorption of all colors. Black can be defined as the visual impression experienced when no visible light reaches the eye. Pigments or dyes that absorb light rather than reflect it back to the eye “look black”. A black pigment can, however, result from a combination of several pigments that collectively absorb all colors. If appropriate proportions of three primary pigments are mixed, the result reflects so little light as to be called “black”. This provides two superficially opposite but actually complementary descriptions of black. Black is the absorption of all colors of light, or an exhaustive combination of multiple colors of pigment. In his new series of ceramics, Sebastian Stöhrer addresses this physical quality of black by placing the sculptures on plinths painted in a very dark black, resulting in an intensive glow and radiance of the glaze. Belgian painter Michiel Ceulers uses similar dark oil and gloss paint in his work Real life data translated into absolute forms, which changes from black into white responding to light and the viewers position. Marcel van Eeden uses compressed charcoal on canvas to paint light. In his dark, mysterious drawings, for which he exclusively uses images that date before his birth in 1965, he creates new stories about glamour and crime from a time period that most of us have only heard of in movies. As in moving images, the light source plays a crucial role in creating suspense, drama and glamour, and we find this very light in van Eeden’s drawings, be it in the reflection of the sun in a window, a sparkling diamond or a dimly lit lamp in a hotel room, yet the only color the artist uses to paint light is black.

Black in the form of charcoal counts also to the first colors used by artists in Neolithic cave paintings in Lascaux 18’000 years ago. Different charcoal pigments were made by burning different woods and animal products, each of which produced a different tone. The charcoal would be ground and then mixed with animal fat to make the pigment. Artists have always searched for new colors – a blacker black, a bluer blue – and found (and patented) it – Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack or the Yves Klein blue. Sara Masüger created a new black in her sculptures made of rubber used in tires and produced in the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrat in France. Depending of the exposure to light, the sculpture radiates in rainbow colors similar to spilled crude oil on a shiny surface. Masüger’s sculpture alludes not only to the chemical aspect of black but leads into the symbolic meaning of such. Like roses of blooming rosebush, the many heads of the artist, cast in rubber, grow in groups and stand alone on slim, long limbs out of its plinth, evoking the uncanny and unknown.

In most cultures black is associated with mystery, the night, the unknown, the supernatural, the invisible and death. In martial arts black symbolizes experience, and, since the Middle Ages, black has epitomized solemnity and authority. Japanese artist Tenki Hiramatsu portraits the devil himself in Teufel and White Petal, two paintings kept in luminous and powerful blacks, greens and reds. A strong contrast between red, green and black is also the subject of Caro Niederer’s large scale painting Am Hang of an alluring, solitary landscape with an intensive red sky, which could be the color of the sky at the end of a beautiful day or the a sky of city on fire. Black as the color of power is the subject in Dorian Sari’s installation Commemoration to fools, a used matrass the artist found on the street, which he painted black and in which he forced large, wooden ring shaped poles. The bed and, in its raw form the matrass symbolizes birth and death, quiet rest and sexual pleasures, but in the color of deep, shiny black clearly hints to the latter. In Ralph Bürgin’s painting titled Passage, a portrait of a neoclassical man, the color black is the dominant color, with just the hint of a dim source of blue light on the left side of the canvas. Yet this dim light suffice to reveal the character of the portrayed.

Black ink is the most common color used for printing books, newspapers and documents, as it provides the highest contrast with white paper and thus the easiest color to read. Similarly, black text on a white screen is the most common format used on computer screens. Annaïk Lou Ptteloud uses the black of the CMYK color system used in mass printing to propagate one of four neologism the artist created in reference to the art industry specifically and today’s society in general. The medium of neon further underlines the concept of mass distribution of these neologism Elitopia in zyan, Glamoglobality in magenta, Narcynicism in yellow and Introspeculation in black. Referring to black ink as a color of publishers, writers and poets is also evident in Kiki Smith’s drawing of black roses on thin Nepalese paper. The poetry of the medium is in hard and very powerful contrast with the black rosebush, a symbol of beauty, power and fragility.

Like a parenthesis embracing subject sitting in darkened room, summarizing all aspects of the color black, is Guillaume Pilet’s rainbow painting. Placed above the entrance of the exhibition, it includes the spectrum of light appearing on sky and as such the color black as absorption of this spectrum, and the exhaustive combination off all colors of a rainbow resulting in black. And similar to the color black, rainbow colors have been used for centuries as a symbol for Cooperative movements, peace and the LTGB community since the 1970s. As this exhibition progresses the focus will shift from its physical, chemical and symbolic characteristics into a study of the color black in history and political movements.