The colour black, says Nitegeka, is notoriously unrevealing and uncompromising. It is the colour of the origin of painting, and of our own origin.
He describes the French expression, that the newborn baby ‘sees the day’, which means that before the day, we were in the dark. This is to suggest that we come from the dark, that, really, we don’t know where we come from and we don’t know where we are headed.
All we know of blackness is its presence. As we return to ashes, as we return to dust, so we return to black.
Artwork courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson Gallery.