Anish Kapoor, the artist who challenges our perception of reality

In 2016, British visual artist Anish Kapoor acquired the Vantablack, a material reputed to be among the blackest ever produced by mankind, for its exclusive artistic use. The production of black matter is the subject of continuous scientific and technological research. One wonders what issues are hidden behind this endless search for new, darker material, and why British visual artist Anish Kapoor has obsessed over it.

Black, light and infinity, three universal questions

Darkness, light and infinity, for scientists, are perpetual questions. Si dans la station spatiale internationale, Thomas Pesquet tourne the tête à l’opposé de la Terre, il ne reste plus que l’espace, infini, noir and parcouru par des luminaires dont le rayonnement fossile issu tout droit du big bang, imperceptible pour His eyes.

As we saw earlier, American astronaut Story Musgrave turned to this aspect and shared with us his experience of space and darkness and these lights and this infinity. He described beautifully how his damaged perception shifted in these unique moments.

The black body is perfect in physics

In physics, the interaction between light and matter is at the heart of many fundamental researches. Two French Nobel Prize winners, Serge Haroche and Claude Cohen TundjiThey spent their scientific lives studying this question. It is at the center of quantum information that surprising new applications are expected. there “quantum black body theory” Because of the Max Planck revolution at the beginning of the XX^H A century of understanding the interaction between light and matter. In physics, a black body defines a perfect object that completely absorbs all the light it receives. The absorption of this electromagnetic energy causes it to heat up and to re-emit light, the wavelengths of which are determined by the temperature of this black body only.

On Earth, received light is primarily visible light. The light re-emitted at room temperature is infrared light, which is invisible to our eyes. From this black object by this definition comes nothing visible to our eyes. If the object’s environment reflecting light is visible, only the contrast makes it possible to locate the black body in space. There is a flaw, a kind of black hole in our reality. Moreover, our eyes are detectors with limited performance, and a black body even without being perfect can show us such a black hole. With this limit of our perception, Anish Kapoor has been playing for years and most recently with Vantablack.

Projects such as the development of Vantablack have very clear aerospace, science or military motivations. Absorption screens lens flare he is one.

Vantablack brings together forests of carbon nanotubes that trap light and play on all the absorption mechanisms at the same time. As a result, 99.965% of the incident light is absorbed. It’s an unusual but simple little red laser pointer that sends out a massive amount of photons per second. Vantablack still comes back often. 99.965% is not 100%. And this difference is important for some applications! MIT reported 99.995% in 2019. The race is on.

Black, light and infinity are also the ones that preoccupy the artists

The painter who probably most explored light in space in his work is Pierre Soulages. His preoccupation with black is well known and lies at the heart of his work, but this has nothing to do with the ideal black body.

On the contrary, he is interested in very real black surfaces that present very complex interactions with light. You just have to look around to find it: most black surfaces reflect grazing light. Some of them reflect a lot of light in these conditions.

Pierre Soulages plays highlights on black in all of these variations. I spent many hours at all times of the day and seasons in front of the greats outrenoir From the exceptionally lit Museum of Grenoble. Drawing by Pierre Soulages I outrenoir in 1969. He’s been down this road for a long time, for our happiness.

But this is not a search for the effects of absolute black in painting. There is, I think, no connection between the artistic approach of Anish Kapoor and that of Pierre Soulage. Here, Anish Kapoor is closer to the astronaut Story Musgrave than to Pierre Soulages. Story Musgrave insists on experiencing this absolute blackness that he “saw” in space through the window of the space shuttle: regions of space, infinite and black, in front of him, emitting no light. As a scientist, he knows it’s empty. But his perception does not know …

Regression in limbo, a black hole for our perception

Media hype about Vantablack indicates great condition. The impression is that scientific and technological progress has radically opened up new possibilities for artistic creativity. Perhaps this mixture of arts and sciences was needed to look at these “blacks” in this way?

However, Anish Kapoor did not wait for Vantablack to create and showcase amazing artworks that explore these questions and this work. What do we see when there is no light for our perception? What is before us in this case?

Anish Kapoor creates the installation Go down to Limbo (Maybe in reference With Mantegna coating) in 1992, long before the black Vantablack, a principle he would later use in many works. The device for this work is very simple: a hole 2.5 meters deep and about 1.5 meters in diameter. Its shell reflects very little visible light, and makes this pinhole unreal by misleading perception.

In the interviews collection with satirical title I have nothing to say Published in 2011, back before the invention of Vantablack, Anish Kapoor also talks about very dark blue paint and adds: “ It happens that blue produces a more intense darkness than black because we don’t see the whole color with our eyes. The eyes are the tools of the mind so we perceive colors with our minds. “.

He said he was pleased with the anger of the visitor who, instead of a very dark blue hole, saw only a black carpet… And I fell into it.

The perfect black body and our humanity

Finally, the intersection between the arts and sciences is noticeable here. The perfect black body in physics is perfect. The material absorbs all incident light. Such an ideal black body for physicists does not exist.

For our eyes, yes! Anish Kapoor creates these situations in which, to the eye, everything is absorbed and nothing is apparently re-released. This is an ideal situation in terms of our perception, but clearly not for physics. Then Anish Kapoor explores his potential for us. He also says in the same group: It is a vision of darkness. Fear is a darkness in which the eye gets lost, and the hand reaches out to it in the hope of contact, and only the imagination escapes from it. And Story Musgrave adds in the movie Dana Rana in Front of the Darkness of Space: “ It’s going to be something with your hands, you know, something you can feel with your hands. Something you can feel flowing through you, something that might be a little squishy Both tell us that absolute “black” is shocking. Extraterrestrial, it confuses us until we get lost.