speciAl focus
Adel Abdessemed, Pluie Noire, 2006 (installation But black isn’t limited to work tackling degraded ideals or corrupted American
view, La Criée Centre d’Art de Rennes), 51 drill
bits, black marble, dimensions variable.
culture. There seem to be an increasing number of works created in black by those
Collection François Pinault. © the artist working across the Atlantic: think of Loris Gréaud’s conceptual work, Tatiana Trouvé’s
twisted black metal and leather sculptures and standalone pieces like Adel Abdessemed’s
giant black marble drills (Pluie Noire, 2006).
But what does Gréaud’s recent project Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted
(2007) – a lifesize black spiral staircase when previewed at Frieze and ‘a giant origami
in black polymirror that shows a Dymaxion projection of the world according to
Buckminster Fuller’ by the time it reached Miami Basel – have in common with a work
like Abdessemed’s burned-out black hulk of a car, Practice Zero Tolerance (2006)?
Seemingly nothing: the first work uses black as an invitation to peer into the dark of
the limitless cosmos or the human psyche to initiate transformative ideas about the
universe, the other is a statement on racial tensions and the violence in Paris suburbs.
On the one hand these artists’ use of black, be it occasional or sustained, isn’t linked by
anything more than what might be a process of osmosis in their disparate and highly
varied practices. Yet in the bustling international environment, as with those gathered
under the Gothic flag, it serves to give the work a certain recognisability. (The absence
of communion between Gréaud’s and Abdessemed’s works hasn’t stopped curators
from trying to convey the sense of a Parisian art scene with its own identity, as with the
Palais de Tokyo’s Notre Histoire exhibition in 2006.) Similarly, last year’s Black Is Black,
at SMAK, Ghent, and former fashion-designer Hedi Slimane’s first outings as artist-
curator – Sweet Bird of Youth, at Arndt & Partner, Berlin, and the Almine Rech booth
at Frieze (both 2007) – were shows where black work had been selected for its formal
quality, offering a somewhat illusory vision of uniformity or cohesion against the wider
visual chaos of the artworld.
In this context the simplicity of black, the anti-colour, seems to flaunt an air of chic
detachment, working as a signature or a trademark for artists who want to rise above the
ruck. Yet it’s hard to think of a more fitting signifier for this disordered moment, with
its sense of everyone running around in the dark, than black: every colour in one and
none, it encapsulates everything and nothing, reducing all concerns to a fine point and
simultaneously expanding to encompass a universe of meanings.
Gardar Eide Einarsson, Untitled (Statue of
Liberty), Untitled (Soldier’s Cross and Helmet),
Untitled (American Flag), all 2007 (installation
view, Frankfurter Kunstverein), all Inkjet prints
on plywood, 200 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist
and Team Gallery, New York
69 Artreview
ART TRENDS 2.indd 69 6/12/07 15:32:57
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