IslANDs - Painterly Experiments & Exploded Sculptures

of red, yellow and, well, blue (not black) of 1921, which
proclaimed the end of representation, and even of painting
itself.
This link continued through Rauschenberg’s black
monochromes of the early 1950s and Ad Reinhardt’s black
canvases of 1957 onwards, as well as Barnett Newman’s and
Mark Rothko’s use of black fields to evoke the Sublime.
In the last century, black has also carried political connotations
(first, Anarchism, then Fascism, in its various forms and,
most recently, the Islamic jihadi movement) and notions of
race and ethnic identity, exemplified both by the culture of
Harlem in the 1920s (jazz, sensuality, colours and patterns
inspired by African rhythms) and post-colonial racial identity,
from the 1970s onwards, in the work of artists such as Adrian
Piper (b. 1942) and Kara Walker (b. 1969) in the USA and
Yinka Shonibare (b. 1968) and Chris Ofili (b. 1968) in the UK.
One could argue that there are contradictory traditions of the
black monochrome—one tied to the sensual indulgence once
associated with the Roman Catholic religion, the other based
on the abstinence and denial representation associated both
with Protestantism and the Judaic faith. As an example of
the former, I would cite the experimentations of the French
painter Pierre Soulages (b. 1929) with the thick and sensuous
application of black paint with a spatula, conducted from the
1950s onwards, and his move towards a spectacular form of
ultrablack (outrenoir), from around 1975-80 onwards, with its
luminous effects and nuanced colouring. And as an example
of the latter, I might choose one of the many painters who
have used black for its symbolic value, as the expression of
the Sublime, as in the case of Ad Reinhardt minimalist Black
Squares, which, with their uniform surfaces, devoid of texture
or aesthetic ambitions, aspire to a quite different form of
other-worldliness, behind the veil of appearances.
This is the dualist tradition that Gudjon Bjarnason—never
completely eschewing representation of the world as we live
it and see it—assimilates and repurposes in a body of work
remarkable for its illuminating darkness.
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