IslANDs - Painterly Experiments & Exploded Sculptures

Beyond the Darkness
by Henry Meyric Hughes
The darkness that pervades Gudjon Bjarnason’s work is fraught
with a very specific cultural significance. In the West, the
black has innumerable moral, psychological, symbolic, social
and religious connotations—some of them, contradictory,
like the positive associations of the black of the rich soil of
the Nile Delta in ancient Egypt, in contrast to the associations
with the Underworld (Hades) in Classical (Greek and Roman)
Antiquity, as well as with the dark recesses of the mind, with
brutality, death and mourning, and—in the Middle Ages–with
the Christian concepts of sin, guilt and suffering. Using black
as the symbol of death and oblivion seems to be common to
many cultures, both occidental and oriental.
What is, perhaps, less commonly realised in the West is
that it is only recently that black and white have come to
be recognised again as colours. Towards the end of the
fifteenth century, at the height of the European Renaissance,
Leonardo da Vinci had declared that black was not really
a colour. This view gained widespread acceptance after the
English scientist Isaac Newton demonstrated that was a
property intrinsic to light, and that “white” light could be
broken down through the prism into its five (or, as he later
believed, seven) constituents. As the poet, Alexander Pope,
put it, in his celebrated epitaph:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said “let Newton be” and all was light
The Impressionists (notably, Manet and the young Renoir)
were among the first to rediscover the autonomous value of
black as a colour, and they were followed by others, including
Matisse. However, the title of a celebrated exhibition at the
newly established Galerie Maeght in Paris, in December
1948”—“Le noir est une couleur’ (Black is a colour)—still had
about it the ring of a challenge to popular belief, after nearly
three hundred years of Newtonian optics.
The period around the second third of the 18th century in
Europe is sometimes referred to as the Age of Enlightenment,
which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant identified
with mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of
the human consciousness from an immature state of grace.
The term Enlightenment itself suggests the “knowability” of
the physical and immaterial world through the white light
of reason, dispelling the dark shadows of chaos, ignorance
and superstition. There is a widespread tendency to view the
18th century Enlightenment of the French philosophes, such
Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire, in opposition to the dark
irrationality of 19th century German Romanticism. Yet, even
44