Why White Paint is Dangerous

            To include white in a painting is to include a blatant out lie. From a western perspective of the symbolic meaning of white, we will tend to associate it with purity, cleanliness, truth, and innocence. Even more scientifically as light, and in terms that white is good for the lungs, meaning white creates visual breathability. In the long run we are claiming to create a white that is pure in a painting, which is a gigantic calamity of an illusion, because a society that is consumed by insidious malignant behavior appears very questionable in their ability to know what is pure, let alone create it. Even if you are a person that partakes in nothing immoral as we would assume it to be, in doing nothing but trying to live, you are doing nothing to help people those who are starving to death.

            White paint alone without use is now on trial. In terms of color theory, when we perceive white light we are actually seeing all the colors at once, but white paint is the absence of all the colors. Which is why Cezanne is of outmost importance not in terms of having led us to cubism, but most importantly from having rescued color from the opaqueness of the impressionist. White should be acknowledge as the destructor of true color, white is inexorably deceptive death. If anything black is now symbolic of life, painting wise, black can be arrived at with the combination of many colors.

            I’m not establishing an admonition to never use white but seeking to bring a better grasp, which might never be fully understood. The white devil in contemporary paintings can be successfully human if it’s at a two percent ratio, and carrying a large amount of spiritual resonance. Another approach would be a fifty percent ratio of white which should be balanced out with a fifty percent ratio of pure untainted color. As soon as white has become the dominant force in a painting, it is easy to say that the painting is nothing more than an illusionistic lie of which our gluttonous society is ever more fond of. In almost all the paintings featured in the 2012 April edition of Art Forum white was incredibly present, same month Chelsea shows between 20^th and 25^th street contain paintings relying far too much on that agonizingly insolent white being brought across as professional. If anything I’m pleased by the fact that I did not remember any of the names of those falsified minds.

            When everything is bad it must be good to know the worst, however were far too concerned with the “black and white”. With an unknowing internal struggle of our artist against white, there are those who are caught in between, and those who have made one good punch line. Being absolutely appalled by white it is by no coincidence that I stumbled upon a show called a Setting for White which is the name of the only successful painting in the show in terms of white. Kees Goudzwaard creates what seems to have a 50% ratio and 2% ratio against a very bright orange that keeps white from dominating the painting. While the painting is balanced in those terms which can be appreciated as a great accomplishment, the overall feel is somewhat stale.

 And while most of the pieces of Mr. Damien Correll our next artist on trial are fairly weak, his still life with skull is truly note worthy. The white within is muted and kept under control by a forest green that lets it go no further in its deception. 

 It is tautology to go any further, so we will end it with Joan Mitchell, who never really quiet got there and was caught in between a hairline nexus of enigmatic brushstrokes of colorful emotion and pitiful opaqueness.