Eric Johnson:
Fade to Black


Fade to Black, new work by Eric Johnson, features the artist’s transition from polychrome sculpture to entirely black pieces.

The color black can symbolize a wide array of concepts, both positive and negative. It often represents power, elegance, formality, and mystery, but can also be associated with death, mourning, and evil. Black can also symbolize strength, resilience, and the unknown.

Louise Nevelson's signature use of black in her sculptures was a deliberate artistic choice, not a simple negation of color. She viewed black as a unifying force, a way to create a sense of totality, peace, and even grandeur in her works. Her monochromatic palettes, often employing black spray paint, transformed disparate found objects into cohesive and mysterious assemblages. For painter Ad Reinhardt, addressing the essential attributes of black was a process of negation, or subtraction, of all extraneous elements, including referential imagery, narrative, emotion, gestural incident and superfluous high color. Johnson is on the same journey.