Instalment 26 (visual art_v1)

Rothko, Mark. Untitled (Black on Grey). 1970.

We’re gonna get super speculative with this week’s piece.

The way I see it, the block of black in the upper half is the ‘true dark’ — a heavy, unbroken, oppressive blackness. And the swath of purplish-grey is the dark as we see it — it alludes to the fact that our eyes interpret what is actually a dull mixture of greys and purples as ‘black’ (look around your bedroom after turning out the lights — you’ll see what I mean). The upper half (‘true dark’) appears uniform, unchanging, and frigid .The lower half (‘our perception’) has depth, color, nuance, imperfection, and a degree of warmth.

So the piece is playing with the notion of the true, unadulterated concept, and the version of this concept that we perceive. The true dark versus the dark as we see it. What we know to be true versus what our senses tell us is true. The truly unknown, the cold nothing, versus the unknown we ‘create’. Food for thought.

Considering Rothko’s time and space (the USA in the 1970s), we can make some more inferences: the American public in the 1970s was fascinated with space, and doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to see this painting as the shape of a planet in space, viewed from above and at an angle. Together with the idea of the true dark as against the dark we know, Rothko might be saying that no matter how ‘dark’ (interpreted literally or metaphorically) our planet gets, it can never be as dead as space. A far-reaching, insightful observation of the miracle of chance that is life on Earth.

Or maybe it’s just a couple of richly textured monochrome blobs. Who knows.