| I |
recollect my first encounter with Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting No 5 at the Tate Gallery, London. From a distance, I thought it was a canvas filled with nothing but black pigment, but on getting closer, I realised that the American artist had divided the surface into a grid of nine equal squares of matte black. He had mixed each black with other hues to create a range of varying blacks – hardly distinguishable from one another and certainly unnameable on a colour chart.
One wonders why the painter chose black to communicate the attributes, effects and supremacy of a single hue. The answer can be found in our immediate surroundings, where black becomes a powerful presence during the holy month of Muharram. As Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain (peace be upon him) and his family, they wear black in many shades. No other colour communicates the seriousness of pain quite as it does. A congregation or procession on the 10th of Muharram, composed of devotees dressed in pure black, like Reinhardt’s painting, but certainly on a different level, conveys the power, plenitude and emotional pull of this hue.
In comparison to other colours, black, being the most dense, mysterious and awe-inspiring sample on a shade card, embodies a vast range of interpretations. Black is usually associated with disappearance, death and grief. The colour is also revered for its religious connections, such as the Hijr-i-Aswad (the Black Stone) and the Ka’ba.
In our mundane lives, it becomes a substance for regaining lost youth; by dyeing hair black, one defies advancing age and appears perpetually young. It is also used as a powder to beautify one’s eyes (kohl) or as a spot to ward off the evil gaze.
James Fox, in his study The World According to Colour, highlights the innumerable connotations of this colour: “If a woman wears a black dress to a funeral it would clearly symbolise mourning and death, but if she jumped into a taxi and attended a cocktail party, the same garment would signify stylish sophistication.”
Black, paradoxically, was not always tied to darkness or death. Fox further elaborates: “The word ‘black’ itself (like many other European words for the colour) comes from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European bhelg, bhel or bhelg, a term originally used to describe the appearance of fire. It meant ‘burn,’ ‘gleam,’ ‘shine’ or ‘flash’ and evolved into a number of words we might think of as black’s opposite – such as ‘bleach,’ ‘blank,’ ‘blond’ and ‘blaze.’”
Faithful from across the world – the Middle East, South Asia, China, Africa, Central Asia, the Far East and parts of Europe and North America – travel to Makkah for Hajj. Pilgrims of diverse complexions, tongues and ethnicities are clad in white to participate in the most sacred duty for Muslims. These men and women circle around the massive black cube – the Ka’ba.
Owing to its scale, centrality and solidity, the mesmerising structure signifies its bond with the divine, while also embodying a fundamental geometric form.
Perhaps the aim of the Russian abstract artist and the desire of Hajj pilgrims converge: to attain a state of the sublime.
Spectators in an art museum may have a similar, though not equivalent, experience of the power and purity of black when viewing Black Square (1913) by Kazimir Malevich. Perhaps the aim of the Russian abstract artist and the desire of Hajj pilgrims converge: to attain a state of the sublime. Both seek liberation from the confusion, contradiction and complexity of daily life, to transcend the material and ascend to a higher, closer to ideal realm.
Black endows another meaning. The Word of God – initially uttered by an angel – was later inscribed in black ink. The tradition continues to this day and has extended to secular texts with the invention of the Gutenberg press and the digital screen. The text in your hands was composed in black letters on a luminous computer screen and is now being read in black print on a white page. Arguably due to this association with scripture, even an ordinary book commands reverence across many cultures. A book dropped to the ground – or a written sheet of paper fallen to the floor – is often picked up and kissed with closed eyes in quiet respect.
Because of its association with the first readable forms – letters that carry meaning for the young learner, black holds special significance in the visual arts. Many Pakistani artists received early education by writing the alphabet in black ink on white-coated wooden tablets (takhti) or plain paper. That early training often lingered in their artistic practice. Several artists, especially from the early generation, bear unmistakable traces of text in their work.
Sadequain is a prime example. Famous for his prolific calligraphic paintings, he also created numerous works based on human figures rendered as if in Kufic script. For a period, he employed a technique of painting in colour, only to coat the entire surface in black and then scratch out the image beneath, unveiling form through erasure.
The fascination with black pigment is also evident in the work of Zahoor-ul Akhlaq, another artist, like Sadequain, whose practice was deeply rooted in literature. Many of his canvases begin with a structure in black, often left unaltered except for the occasional tint. I recall a day in Akhlaq’s studio, watching him paint: he took a thick bar of charcoal and sketched the silhouette of a female figure reminiscent of those in Indian miniature paintings, alongside a lone cloud and a mountain-like cylindrical form. He fixed the imagery with spray and coated the entire surface with successive layers of thin black acrylic, an ode to the subtlety and sombreness of black.
Mohammad Ali Talpur, too, constructs his compositions with grids of densely arranged black lines, sequences of unreadable script, and, more recently, smoke drawings. These evoke not so much an object or scene as the fading memory of a lost existence.
A survey of artists who have worked primarily in black would fill a volume. The French painter Pierre Soulages, often called the painter of black, created expansive, luminous canvases composed of thick, layered black paint. His use of substantial texture enabled the surface to reflect light, resulting in a paradoxical blend of deep opacity and radiant glow. Standing before this work, one feels temporarily disconnected from the world, drawn into a void that, like the sculptures of Anish Kapoor, opens a space as real, permanent and magnificent as the black-and-white films we continue to cherish in an age dominated by digital production and artificial reality.
The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirzagmail.com.