from “The Reinvention of Black” by MARK PEPLOW at Nautilus.us
“Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. (…) This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. (…)
(…) 18th century sparked advances in mining technology that boosted the output of coal-based pigments including Bideford black, while simultaneously driving up demand. (…)
In the 1840s, August Hofmann extracted aniline (a benzene ring connected to a nitrogen-containing amine group) from coal tar. Then in 1856, William Perkin, (…) synthetic dyes. By 1860, other researchers had found (…) a new black pigment: aniline black. (…)
Around the middle of the century, paint-makers began to offer a synthetic inorganic black pigment known as Mars black.(…) Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali used Mars black, and said of Jacques Blockx, who developed one of the earliest commercial Mars black oil paints, “This man, who never painted, will contribute more to the painters of tomorrow than what we will have accomplished, all the modern painters together.”
(…) Developed in the 1930s, enamel paints (…) gave Pollock’s “drip paintings” a sheen that emphasized their explosive power, and a durability that continues to please conservators. (…)
To describe NanoBlck-Sqr #1 as a black square seems not only obvious, but a gross understatement. Created by De Wilde, (…) The surface of NanoBlck-Sqr #1 is coated with a forest of carbon nanotubes that trap more than 99.99 percent of the light that falls on them. Exhibited in London earlier this year, its complete lack of discernable features produces a sense of limitless depth—viewers have an urge to reach right into the space it creates. (…)
The artwork continues the intersection of science and aesthetics that has so characterized the history of the color black.(…)
In the mid-2000s, De Wilde realized that he might be able to control the behavior of reflected light by tailoring pigments at the nanoscale.(…) In 2010, De Wilde began collaborating with chemist Pulickel Ajayan at Rice, and soon producedHostage pt.1, a black square not much bigger than a postage stamp that was billed as the blackest painting ever made.(…)
De Wilde went on to apply a carbon nanotube-based optical coating technology developed at NASA to cover a set of 3-D printed titanium structures. The result is a series of objects collectively calledM1Ne II, which look like futuristic birds’ nests about 20 centimeters across. The structures hearken back to the birth of the industrial revolution by reflecting data about seven coal mines around Limburg in Belgium. This data includes the depths of the shafts, the amount of air pumped into them, the energy produced by their coal, and the relative locations of the mines. “In part it symbolizes the cohesion of the coal miners—they had to rely on each other to survive,” says De Wilde.” read full article