Strewn pigment at the base creates a halo effect, giving the impression that the visible sculpture is simply the tip of an iceberg with hidden wonders below, but this is a fiction. What appears to be a delicate pile of loose powder is a carefully built structure supporting its skin of pigment.
Dense, billowy, matt powder was applied methodically, almost ritually. Without needing words or even articulated thought, colour functions as a direct and visceral route to metaphor. Kapoor retains that visceral quality even in his more complicated works, by hiding away any makers' marks or mechanisms beneath all this red.
Svayambh [above] extends that concept, concealing an elaborate infrastructure designed in collaboration with a team of engineers. A colossal block shaped like a train, comprising several tons of gooey red pigment blended with wax and petroleum jelly, moves imperceptibly slowly on a track that passes through doorways smaller than the massive block. The viewer perceives the red train squeezing through each passage, extruding itself, leaving residue behind and creating its own form, again and again.
Red is a bright, extroverted presence that beckons, yet at the same time it stands for a darker, internal world. Red is the centre. The book uses artworks as case studies to tell the story of ten individual colours or colour groups. It explores the history and meaning of each colour in art, highlighting fascinating tales of discovery and artistic passion, and offering easily accessible explanations of the science and theory behind specific colours.
The idea of denying access to the purest black to date, then, is in no small way a crime against art. For many artists, there was no reason, other than greed or malice, that Kapoor would do this. Semple, another British artist, found himself likewise allured by the abyssal color.
To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor. At that point, everybody started writing in and asking me to make a black. To date, Kapoor has been able to make only sparring use of Vantablack due to the extreme expense and difficulty of producing large quantities of the material. Vantablack is no longer the blackest black on the market: in , a material was developed at MIT which absorbs The piece consists of a single diamond, coated in this new, darkest material, thus appearing as an absolute void.
Strebe and Wardle use a different composition of carbon nanotubes, which will be available for any artist to use.
Stuart Semple. The Vantablack Controversy: Anish Kapoor vs. Are you enjoying this article? Sign up to our Free Weekly Newsletter. When Kapoor got exclusive artistic rights to this material a few years ago, there was a bit of a hoo-ha. He shows me 19 more of these freaky spatial illusions in an upper room of his studio.
Next year they will be unveiled at the Venice Accademia show. Is it a cliche to ask if this fascination with colour was influenced by his childhood in India? This propensity for red has to have something of that.
I think of Picasso and his relation to his Spanish roots. In fact, when I push him to explain how his gory canvases reflect his own psyche, as opposed to anthropological ideas, he comes out with a moving story about India, displacement and the healing power of ritual. My mother was Jewish, so my brother and I then went to Israel. And I had the most awful, terrible nervous breakdown. I could hardly walk. I had an aunt who lived in Israel and my mother came to visit me.
You know it took me years to recognise the power of this thing. It gives me goosebumps. Sorry, but it does give me goosebumps. Kapoor is an artist who takes you to the edge. He can make you contemplate the biggest questions. His new paintings are not so much a departure as a key to everything he has ever done, ransacking religion and myth to ask why human beings have always been driven to ponder the mystery of being.
It matters to me. I do really believe that we are religious beings. Where do I come from? Who am I?
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