Dark is black. It is the absence of light and references, the lack of narration and emotion. Exactly what we find in Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, in which there is no reference to reality, and the whole representation revolves around black and nothing more, at most in its minimum nuances.

Reinhardt is considered the father of a minimal, conceptual art: an art of negation, which in the absence of any form reaches the highest purity, the absolute. It is in nothing that you find the way and the opportunity to meditate, assigning that attention and time necessary for contemplation.

Ad Reinhardt – Courtesy Antinomie

His works perfectly express his conception of art, which must be itself and nothing else: “not objective, not representative, not figurative, not imaginative, not expressionist, not subjective”.

They are the paintings of invisibility, which cannot be described and reproduced: just as in the dark the lack of light leads to absence, the same happens in his Abstract Paintings. Yet everything is found in nothing, complexity is hidden behind those apparently monochrome surfaces.

Kazimir Malevič, Quadrato nero, 1923 -Courtesy Artribune

It is a journey traveled over the years that undoubtedly takes its cue from the Black Square, by Kazimir Malevič, the “zero point of painting”, which is itself regular and compact. He wanted to be the voice of Suprematism, that movement that invoked the supremacy of art in its essentiality.

Is non-painting par excellence therefore an expression of the absence of light par excellence?