Seeing in the Dark

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. (Genesis 15:12)

Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), often regarded as France’s greatest post-WWII painter, emphasized two formative influences: the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux he saw as a boy, and the abbey-church of Sainte-Foy de Conques where he decided to become a painter.

The cave paintings shaped Soulages’s sense of time. He rejected notions of linear progress in art and sought to return to the primal colours and powerful lines he’d seen at Lascaux. They also piqued his interest in darkness: why, he asked himself, did people enter a cave to paint?

The Romanesque church inspired the artist’s lifelong engagement with darkness and light. An early American champion of Soulages wrote of Sainte-Foy:

there, it was no dead blackness, but a live and gently palpitating dark suffused with a subtle illumination which reached its fullness in slashes of light from the high narrow windows and the soft glow where it struck the floors and walls. (Sweeney 1972: 10–11)

Years of painting with bold slashes of black, often against rich umber or white—the colours of the cave paintings and the church—led ultimately to what Soulages called ‘Outrenoir’, beyond black. By 1979, he understood that he needed no other colour.

Yet, as is clear in the painting in this exhibition, Soulages wasn’t working so much with black paint as with light. Tiny points and blades of white light flash through the darkness in the places where the brush strokes don’t quite meet.

But the real light is not shining through the darkness, it is emanating from it. The source of the gradations and distinctions is not different shades of black, or paint applied more thickly in one place than another. It is the way light plays on brush strokes and swipes of the palette knife on black paint.

We’re seeing, as it were, in the dark, as Abram did when God appeared as a flaming torch in the deep and terrifying darkness after sunset.  

References

Celis, Ana Maria. 2018. ‘Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Lot 22 C, Lot Essay’, www.Christies.com, available at https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6171880 [accessed 2 December 2024]

Johnson Sweeney, James. 1972. Pierre Soulages (New York: New York Graphic Society)

[Y]our offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs and shall be enslaved people, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. (Genesis 15:13–14; own translation)

In ‘Disrupted Layer’, a 2023 exhibition at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem curated by Sally Haftel Naveh and Tamar Shavit, seven works created especially for the exhibition by artist Zohar Gotesman (b. Israel, 1979) were placed in and around the museum’s Archaeology Wing.

The first work visitors encounter is a mock Assyrian relief, resting at the entrance to the wing on a pallet jack. It’s a quotation of a seventh-century BCE relief from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Lachish, Nineveh. Created for the Palace of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who besieged Jerusalem and subjugated Abram’s descendants, the original relief, damaged and incomplete, is on view at the British Museum.

Gotesman retains just one member of the ancient relief’s crew of enslaved people, and he ‘restores’ what Assyriologists concur was the original cargo: a lamassu, the Assyrian winged bull-human hybrid, probably destined to guard the palace gates.

The subject matter of Gotesman’s relief—an artefact on a kind of sledge being pulled by an enslaved person—is a microcosm or ‘doubling’ of his artwork in its entirety: it is an artefact on a pallet jack. His relief’s solitary enslaved person parallels the lone museum worker tasked with moving it.

But in Gotesman’s artwork the worker is absent, and in that respect it mirrors not so much the one enslaved person he retained, as the many enslaved people he eliminated from his relief, and perhaps even the missing lamassu he ‘restored’ from the original relief. Where is this object going, museum visitors ask themselves? And where is the museum worker who should be taking it there?

By spotlighting the single enslaved person pulling the lamassu, and provoking speculation about the whereabouts of the museum worker, Gotesman elevates both the lowly enslaved person over the lamassu—the mysterious object that typically commands our attention in a museum—and the typically overlooked museum worker over the artwork he (Gotesman) has made—as well as over other works like it in the museum space. For all its intrigue, it deflects our attention beyond itself, and encourages us to question the museum’s very raison d'être.

References

Borschel-Dan, Amanda. 2023. ‘Podcast: At the Israel Museum, Touring 7 New Wonders of the Ancient World, 27 January 2023’, www.timesofisrael.com, available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/podcast-at-the-israel-museum-touring-7-new-wonders-of-the-ancient-world/ [accessed 2 December 2024]

He brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’. Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’. (Genesis 15:14)

Biblical Hebrew applies the word zera, ‘seed’, both to human offspring, such as the descendants promised to Abram in Genesis 15, and to the reproductive units of plants.

Dornith Doherty, a Professor at the University of North Texas, uses photography, video, animations, works on paper, and scientific imaging to highlight ecological and philosophical issues arising from human interaction with the environment. Doherty thinks about how, at a time of climate crisis and threatened biodiversity, we can protect nature in the far future. Archiving Eden is an ongoing collaborative project in which she creates images of seed banks and the seeds they preserve. Using X-ray equipment intended to assess viability, Doherty documents and collages seeds and tissue samples from all around the globe. The magnified images of forms invisible to the naked eye inspire awe, she says, in the power of tiny plantlets and seeds to survive for as long as two hundred years with the capacity to generate new life.

In the work shown here, Doherty used lenticular animation, a technology that employs special lenses to produce images that seem to change or move when viewed from different angles. This digital collage of domesticated varieties of husk corn shifts through green, yellow, and brown as viewers pass by, mimicking changes in seeds as they are dried for preservation.

These still photographs whose colours change as they are looked at by viewers allow Doherty to preserve a single moment in these seeds’ lives while at the same time suggesting nature’s ongoing processes. Preservation and process: there is an echo here of the goal of the seed banks, as scientists preserve seeds from the relentless depredations of human activity, not so much to stop time as to shape its course; to point to potential future transformations in the lives of these seeds.

In some cases, the banks and the people who built and maintain them inspire as much awe as the seeds themselves. In St Petersburg during the Second World War, a group of scientists starved to death to safeguard seeds they could otherwise have eaten, for the sake of a future they hoped in. Doherty’s photographs put us in touch with a hope like theirs—and perhaps like Abram’s.