Black and White

Early on in this Black & White show, a conversation started about color. As in, was any color allowed at all? Now this is interesting, because art is full of instances where a bit of color serves to highlight the special properties of an otherwise entirely black and white image. At a certain “you know it when you see it” point, that bit tips over into a full-color image. The selections include several marvelous examples of the former, works by artists S.P. Harper, Amy Kaps, Christopher Sullivan and Mary Anna Pomonis for example, where the deliberate use of a moment of color sets off the predominantly black, white and grey palette. Spare a thought for collage artists whose “white” paper is foxed and aged, maturing into something lightly earthen, warm and tactile, becoming neither color nor its absence.

Mediums like charcoal, graphite, pen and ink, etching, and some kinds of photography lend themselves to the black and white idiom, being essentially grey-scale by default. Many artists in the exhibition clearly use those mediums and visual idioms in their practice, because they have gained assertive mastery in their employment. Catherine Walker, DeAnn Prosia, Ricky Amadour, Jean-Paul Aboudib, Alex Angel, and Matthew McHugh demonstrate this kind of advanced skills in their deeply impressive works.

The photography included runs its own gamut, from work that taps into the visual idioms of photojournalism -- evocative yet documentarian, so that clarity is balanced with a sense of experience -- to that which embraces moodier, art historically-infused studies of optics, zone systems, and more nearly painterly concerns. What the selected works have in common is that they did not merely happen to exist in black and white, or result from a simple filter imposed after composition, but rather, the included photographic images were fluent in the special, almost secret language of black and white photography, and proceeded according to this unique poetry.

The prevalence of portraiture across several mediums is also a lovely aspect to this show. There’s something about rendering the figure, especially the face, in black and white. It imparts a certain empathy and intimacy to the images which is quite moving, and sort of gives the artist “nowhere to hide” in terms of their skill and technique. The examples in this show are some of the most accomplished portraits I’ve seen recently. Just completely beautiful.

A note on abstraction in this context. I would imagine that it’s more challenging to create a fully formed, emotional and cerebral, patterned or fractal, precise or expressive, gestural or finely resolved composition with neither an expanded palette nor a set of images to work with. It’s so pure, but then, it’s like walking a tightrope without a net. There’s no color to pique emotion, there’s no representation to create narrative -- there is only the artist, their hand, and the medium. Bravo to artists like Barbara Kolo, Lenka Konopasek, Weiting Wei, and Julie Alland who figured out how to get there.