Light has been an enduring beacon over the centuries in the art of painting. Caravaggio and the Impressionists came after, and from them, artists never stopped being light masters, using highlights, reflections, and chiaroscuro to define form, introduce drama, and give the world life. What about its shadow? To paint pure darkness is a much more subtle, more intricate, and deeper challenge. Not the lack of light, nor a shadow that darkens a larger light. Genuine artistic darkness is an affirmative strength, a necessary plane used by artists, sculptors, and filmmakers to call forth the infinite, the unknowable, the spiritual, and the inner realms of the human mind. To use darkness is to manipulate all beyond the sight and cognizance of man.
The most direct way of representing darkness is maybe with light. It's chiaroscuro taken to extremes. In Baroque portraits by a master like Rembrandt, we have people emerging from deep surrounding darkness. Their faces and hands are illuminated, but the in-between darkness is not empty. It is dark, indistinct, and full of possibility. It implies a reality outside the edge of the canvas, outside the horizon of the painting, where anything at all might be lurking. It is not an emptiness, but a presence. It enfolds the light, giving it meaning and importance. By not showing us the complete lit landscape, the painter compels our imagination to fill in the blackness with our own desires, our own nightmares, and our own hopes. The artwork is a mutual work of artist and observer, completed in the mind's eye.
The secret to the representation of ultimate darkness is this suggestibility. The human mind is trained to seek out patterns and structure in arbitrary objects. We are faced with a heavy, swamplike darkness in a painting and cannot help but try to peer into it, try to find shape and sense. The artist who succeeds in this can create vast tension and suspense. That was done by 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner. In his late seascapes and storms, sea, sky, and air are combined into a whirlpool of black revolving paint. It is a vision of elemental and anarchic night, an elemental force of nature unveiled and overwhelming the senses. We do not see any drawn shapes, but the awful hint of wave, wind, and cloud all blending into a gigantic and stupendous blackness which will swallow all.
With abstraction pushed even further in this direction, the 20th century witnessed artists trying to depict darkness itself. Russian artist Kazimir Malevich painted his renowned Black Square in 1915, a white canvas with a black square. This was no depiction of a black thing, but rather an attempt at depicting the concept of pure feeling, something outside objective fact. The blackness here is absolute, non-representational, and metaphysical. It is a lack, but one of hope, closing one art world and opening into a new dawn. It is an obscurity that calls upon the viewer to bring his own imagination to its depths, and in so doing admirably offers a mirror to the soul rather than a window to the world.
Darkness as supernatural has been used long enough as a metaphor for the mystery of the divine. In each mystical tradition, and Christian mysticism overall, the path to God involves a "cloud of unknowing" or "divine darkness." Nothing but sinful, it is a darkness of something so profound and radiant that it occurs beyond human perceptions and intellect. The artworks that have tried to depict this phenomenon have thus used darkness as a metaphor for the unutterable. Most successful blacks and maroons in the massive, color-field canvases of Mark Rothko throb and float in front of us. They are not depictions of something. They are black and color meant to produce a high, near-religious emotional impact. The black is mirror-like, surrounding, and censorious, suggesting a place beyond word and picture, somewhere else than here.
Sculpture, too, grapples with representing blackness, but not as color, but as void and form. British sculptor Anish Kapoor has bought exclusive rights to Vantablack, one of the darkest materials in existence, which absorbs 99.96% of all visible light. When applied to a three-dimensional form, Vantablack does the impossible: it erases the form of the form. The human eye, incapable of perceiving edges, highlights, or shadows, cannot understand what it sees. A sculpture painted in Vantablack is not viewed as a volume, but as a two-dimensional black hole, an absolute nothing in space. This is as sheer artistic creation of darkness imaginable—a darkness so absolute that it annihilates what it encompasses, causing an experience of the sublime that is horrific and deeply disturbing. It is darkness as strong, consuming energy.
On screen, 'darkness' is a device to be employed in horror and suspense, but is also a device to be employed in indicating inner states. In the noir films, heroes' and villains' faces are obscured by shadows, suggesting corruption as well as ulterior motives. Darkness is the visual keystone of the deception and concealment that drive the plot. In more recent experimental cinema, extended periods of virtual darkness can force the viewer to listen, to sound, and to suspense. The screen going black is a canvas on which our own psychological map may be drawn, and brings the experience home. It is the dark places of the human mind, the things we wish we had not seen and could not forget, that in the depths behind locked doors in our own darkness. The quest of artists for the ultimate darkness is, ultimately, a quest to the limit of vision and the very limits of the world itself.
Light defines the borders of the world of things—the material, the known, the logical. Darkness, then, represents everything else: the infinite, the unconscious, the spiritual, and the potential. Darkness is the page of the universe before the Big Bang, the bottom of the ocean trench, and the quietness of the mind in contemplation. To describe darkness is to recognize that the majority of what is is out of the limits of our apprehending and representing ability. It is an exercise in deepest humility and greatest creative longing. Those who master darkness know that it is not an end, but a start. It is this fertile soil from which light, form, and meaning first spring and to which they will all eventually return in silence. By working out the formless, these artists tell us nothing about ourselves; they describe everything we are not, and thus lead us to a point of realization of the great mystery of what we are.