LIGHT ON WHITE

malevich revisited

m. evans

“Thoughts that come from doves’ feet guide the world” Nietzsche

The Light on White series observes the capacity of a given practice to produce its own object. This statement hides its own profundity in history for Malevich had noted in painting: “In attempting to reproduce the living form, they reproduced its dead image in the picture… Everything was taken alive and pinned quivering to the canvas, like insects in a collection” and Nietzsche in philosophy: “All that philosophers have handled for mil-lennia have been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive”. For Malevich the “Black Square” does not represent, it is the “birth of the painting-surface”, more alive than any human face with a pair of eyes and a grin and it is clear that for him and Nietzsche that “alive” and “life” refer to some-thing specific – the capacity of a given practice to give birth to its own object (and not merely to represent, duplicate, or display reproductions).

Light on White is not a painting though it is painted. It is not a picture, though it does depict. It is not a design, though it does state something. It is the birth of the painted space, not a development of its surface. Though it has been argued that Nietzsche is an anti-philosopher and Malevic an anti-painter, the prefix anti is not exclusory or in opposition to their respective fields. It would be better to understand them as meta-philosopher and meta-painter for they go beyond the classical confines of their respective craft. And so it is with Light on White from an interior architect. Light on White utilises the refractive indices of different white paints, a property given to them by their material basis, to bring about a very real optical spatial experience. Titanium white has the highest refractive index, where the greatest reflection of light can be witnessed. Magnesium has a lower refractive index and will only engage the eye within a critical field. Opalescent has a mixture of refractive indices and will change its shade and position with reference to light and the witness.

Ideally the work should be lit from a single profile lamp which gives off parallel light rays however other or changing lighting conditions will produce a version of the spatial effect intended. One will perceive the nuance of space upon the surface, planes of different whites that disappear, reappear, pop at a certain critical position and change hues as one passes by the work or as the light changes. The work makes use of proprioceptive qualities of visual perception in an extremely subtle way. We see what we see, and make intelligible information of the world and ourselves in it, through what is reflected into the eye. We do not see light directly; we see its effect as a reflection as it bounces off the objects within our view into our eyes. It is this phenomenon that is taken into account in the production of the first painted space.

The first painted space is already late; it is a return of a sort. It is a contemporary artistic reconsideration of Nietzsche’s “midday moment”, the “stillest hour”, the “shortest shadow”. It points towards a concept of interior design that is philosophical, psychological, artistic and ever so sensually intimate. The moment where the “One turns to Two”, namely, the very moment of a split or rupture, is also the birth of the most intimate and sacred part of ourselves. He writes: “We immoralists! – This word which concerns us, in which we are called upon to fear and to love, this nearly invisible, in audible word… a ‘not quite’ word in every respect, prickly, insidious, jeering, tender”. He explodes at the very point where he condemns the world for their inability to recognise a ‘nuance’. (“I cannot endure this race among whom one is always in bad company, that has no fingers for nuances – alas, I am a nuance”. ) Nietzsche privileges the silent, the solitude, play, lightness, nuance, minimal difference, and sweet paradox. He praises “nuances, of dance, of perspectivity, of fictions, of the layering of appearances and differences” and for him this is the “bomb” of the event which is the “midday moment, “the stillest hour”, the “shortest shadow” – that site where we meet ourselves and know ourselves in the middle, stillest, shortest, most silent nuance of space/time. It is a time within time (midday) and it is a space within space (meta-surface).

Light on White is a white moment, a spatial event where the one (the surface) becomes two (the thing that is itself and at the same time something other) circumscribed as a nuance, a shadow at midday. Even the shadow of the viewer has a part to play in the event of the work. It is our most intimate partner that arrests the light and holds it in its outline as part poet in the reading of the moment. The work, as a work that works, is a kind of marriage or bond between the one that is turned to two, that is itself and something more, a bond that is delicate, intimate, sensuous, inspired and most highly aspired to for it comes and exists only in the moment, the “Augenblick”, the blink of an eye.