The three dark colors, at first glance, stand as independent blocks. But stand and stare into the painting. Scan it as if looking for something you lost like your keys, your cellphone, or meaning in your life. The colors shift and fade and take on varying shapes as the mind tries to create order and glimpse images in the paint: a cloud, a wheel of a car, a face fading in the fog. Lines of color shift in the margins. What things rise from this color void? A death mask connected to an umbilical cord. What does the absence of light show us? The colors vibrate and colors that aren’t there emerge and shimmer. Stare at the block of black and it takes over. It spreads like falling night, enveloping the canvas in a single color that is none of them, but all of them combined in a color that isn’t possible unless they are all blended. The color dissolves and the blocks reappear, like approaching a house at nightfall as we walk through a drizzle and a fire-colored fog.
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“If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Nietzsche
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Author’s photo taken at the MOCA in Los Angeles on 17 OCT 2021.
