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El negro Beatriz Zamora (2015)
The exploration of the color black is one of the defining concerns of Beatriz Zamora’s practice. This monochromatic exercise unfolds a formal investigation that has come to incorporate materials typically considered foreign to painting, such as obsidian and coal. In doing so, the artist has developed an extensive repertoire of nuances that bring together texture and materiality as propositions of color. Yet beyond a discourse on chromaticism, her body of work is grounded in an epistemological inquiry; rather than investigating black things, Zamora asks about the blackness of things.
These five imposing blocks of acrylic resin refer to one of black’s most seductive qualities: its semiotic capacity to reconcile notions that are essentially opposed. With the ability to signify both saturation and absence, emptiness and abundance, nonexistence and presence, addition and subtraction, or everything and nothing at once, black monochromes as a painterly project create a space in which conceptual dualities may converge. Although this mediation generates an almost antagonistic tension, it is not necessarily a struggle between opposites but rather a dichotomous coexistence that reveals the Latin root of the word versus: a movement of going and returning that has long been misunderstood as opposition.
Extending across two-dimensional surfaces, the blackness of the resin presents itself to the viewer through subtle variations from one panel to the next. A chromatic palette sustained by the scales and tonalities of black allows a single color to be contemplated as a cluster of possibilities. Through a persistent exercise of inquiry that seeks to glimpse just how black the blackness of things can be, Zamora’s work calls for the transcendence of Manichaean conceptions of reality and an embrace of the shades that life itself has to offer.