Grey Paintings

Reproductions of art in books are, at best, limiting. I remember looking in an art encyclopaedia as a kid and seeing some Impressionist paintings reproduced in shades of grey. This fuzzy grey mass of brushstrokes looked ghost-like. But it also made one imagine the colour that was absent.

Sometimes in the colour images, the CMYK plates used in printing become slightly out of line, creating a sliver of a bright yellow showing through where there was only supposed to be Rembrandt's dark shadows or a loud magenta peeking through a subdued Morandi still life.

I recently found a grey reproduction of Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue II". As the title suggests these colours, one has to project them onto the image. One has to image what the darker shade correspond to- red or blue? I could only think of other paintings I have seen of his and try to remember those reds and blues. But memories of colours are equally as inconstant as reproductions.

The reproductions, particularly of paintings, offer a mediated view of the works. They distort through the yellowed paper colour, the fading inks which were imperfect to begin with, the scaled-down size. So that the images in these books become different versions of the pieces themselves, like a jazz improvisation on a theme. They form the haze surrounding an artwork, like clues in a detective novel, some more useful that others, pointing to the artwork that has been stolen by Reproduction.