The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art.

The cover of my new book.

My new book is about to be published by Reaktion Books, after a few months delay due to the pandemic.

Monochrome painting is a genre that began life as the minimal or the most extreme possibility, the beginning and the end, the point towards which to converge, depart, or fly free.   Monochromes were the  outcome of  the spiritual and contemplative mind,  but equally of  a mind dedicated to the empirical and literal.

Monochromes were made in pursuit of  the most ethereal, extra-sensory experiences,  and also the  most concrete and sensory. In its heyday  between 1915 and the mid-1960s artists who made monochrome art claimed to be concerned with the seemingly vastly different but actually closely linked experiences of emptiness, nothingness, absence, silence, spiritual and intellectual transcendence, immateriality, infinity, purity, origins, essence, autonomy, absoluteness, specificity, materiality, repetition, seriality,  rigour, recklessness, and boredom. Through the faculty of visual perception artists explored the dialectics of the limit and limitlessness, the bounded and boundless, form and formlessness, being and nothingness.

For all their apparent simplicity, monochromes turns out to be very complicated. They may be visually simple, but they are usually conceptually complex.  For some artists, a monochrome will be an object, but for others  it is a spiritual icon. A monochrome is flat but also, potentially, infinitely deep. It is empty of imagery, but full of paint. It is composed of the most ubiquitous of elements – colour –  but often addresses the most esoteric of meanings.  It can be made by anyone, and yet is usually the province of the most intellectually questioning and challenging of artists.   But in one way or another,  artists who make monochromes are involved in what one of its most important exponents, Yves Klein, called the ‘monochrome adventure.’