Granularities
On blackness, flatness, negative space and texture.
A series of works using Musou Black, a paint that absorbs up to 99.4% of all reflected light, giving an almost perfect black.
Squidsoup’s exploration of immersion is one of composition in light and space, of large colourful animated emissive arrays, dimensional and shared. Their works are sites of shared experience as a performance of light against a dark night sky.
Granularities is, in many ways, the antithesis of that approach. It offers a dimensionless, meaningless darkness, set against a backdrop of bright white. Pure contrast – absorption and reflection, inert.
These images (or lack of image) taunt us; they challenge us not to apply meaning, and yet we cannot help ourselves.
We know these are not paintings of spaces, or representations of objects. on close inspection, we realise that there is no grey area in these paintings. Despite initial appearances, there are no blurred hinterlands, just black and white.
But our eyes cannot augment the spray of ink, in a barely conscious irresistible process. We struggle with the contrast, the obvious data gaps. Our mind applies our experience to these incomplete visual stimuli, delineating space and finding dimension, making objects and stories, giving them pattern, form and meaning.
