Testo pubblicato in "Semiotica. Journal of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies" (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2000) e in
"Views in Literary Semiotics" (Legas, New York - Ottawa - Toronto,
2003) accompagnato da 10 riproduzioni in bianco e nero dal titolo "Light".
Designing light is something different from painting it.
Painting needs a variety of colors obtained by fundamental chromogenic elements.
The luminosity and contrasts of a painting can be identified through photometric
and colorimetric analysis and through flourescence of x-rays, just as it is
possible to identify the color range and the chemical composition of the materials
used.
If a painting is examined radiographically it is possible to trace the fundamental
chromogenic elements from the cromatic range established approximately by optical
examination.
This kind of work was carried out by Maltese et al. (1991) on some paintings
by Caravaggio, in whose work light notoriously plays a fundamental role.
For example, examining Caravaggio's painting Ragazzo con canestro di frutta
(Boy with a fruit basket) (Maltese et al. 1991: 3-8) with x-rays we discover
that the wide variety of colors corresponds to a very small number of fundamental
chromogenic elements, specifically mineral pigments of which only three were
revealed by the XFR (lead, iron and tin).
The wide range of different tones are due to clays (from Siena, burnt ochre,
etc.), as well as organic substances (organic varnishes and blacks). Light is
painted and painted with.
Illumination and the origin of light in a painting are obviously what outlines
an object, a face, what materializes it, gives it the sense of its opacity,
transparency, roughness, smoothness, is what varies a color, gives different
tonalities, lights up a painting or darkens it.
A black and white drawing is also essentially based on a play on light, brightness
and darkness.
Painting light directly or rather drawing it without color, with a simple
stroke of the pen and without the illuminated object, this is the intention
of the plates which accompany this essay. The number of them (10) corresponds
to the nine Heavens plus the Empyrean.
Designing light
A task which would seem to re-evoke the "elemental" painting of
English and German romanticism of the late XVIII and the first half of the XIX
century, whose aim was that of portraying elements of nature, in their singularity
and purity: "la représentation d'un pur élément, on
serait tenté de dire un pur vide ou une pure absence", "pure
transparence" (Gandelman 1988: 35).
An example is Abend a painting of 1824 by Caspar David Friedrich, whose
wife, it seems, said to his friends who came to visit him: "On the days
when he paints the air it is absolutely impossible to talk to him!"
It is difficult to say whether elemental painting is pioneeristically part
of non figurative painting. In actual fact it proposed a portrayal, that of
pure elements, without the objects.
This absence of the object may suggest that it is not figurative and draw
it nearer to the "intention mallarméenne" of putting emptiness
in the place of things and in things which are made precisely to be looked at,
paintings.
Kandinsky also called his first works non figurative "paintings without
objects" (Gegenständslose Malerei).
In the designs of light reproduced as a part of this article, rather than
abolishing representation it is a question of representing or better of portraying
the unrepresentable, as in elemental painting, but unlike this, using pen strokes,
something therefore which outlines, sketches, circumscribes, encloses. It is
not a question of the elements but of what in the bible story precedes and is
created first of all, the absolute original, light.
Icons of light
There is an iconography of light, in which icon and symbol, as understood
by Peirce, similarity and convention (its representation by means of rays: considerfor
example in sculpture, Bernini and the plastic representation of light) support
each other reciprocally.
The figurative representation of light can make use of verbal icons, of images
present in speaking about light, which, rather than being metaphors, are expressions
which "literally" say light in an indivisible fusion of figurative
and descriptive language.
The same contrast light/obscurity, light/darkness, separation (in the cosmogonic
sense as well) of light from the shadow (post tenebra lux) is part of
the common places of speaking through which light is expressed, in any language.
It is part of "common speaking", it is present in all initialisation
rituals and in metaphors of rebirth and regeneration, as well as of knowledge
and spiritual elevation.
Light is portrayed, also verbally, as irradiation starting from a point,
as an extension generating from that primordial point in a literal sense as
well. It is connected with the idea of giving order to chaos by means of its
own irradiation, it is geometrically portrayable as a division, separation,
sectorialisation of space.
Light is expressed as splendor, as vibration, as emanation,
direct irradiation or as refraction, as shining, sparkling.
The undulating and the corpuscular theories suggest icons of light,
ways of representing the unrepresentable.
Light/heat, Light/east/dawn, Light/noon, Light/birth, Light/its degrees of
intensity, Light/creative force, Light/life, Light/resurrection, Light/epiphany,
Light/elevation are pre-established associative icons which make the representation
of light possible.
Designing light in black and white
Why white? In physics, what we define generically as light, is called "white
light", meaning "pure" light.
The design of light can, therefore, assume this verbal interpretant as a criterion
of similarity with light, which becomes an icon of light. White light is a "homogeneous"
light which can be broken down by means of a prism into an undefined number
of colored light sources (seven conventionally) amongst which red light and
blue light are the strongest sources (Newton's theory of colors).
Another interesting experiment is Goethe's well-known disk. It is formed of
independent primary colors distributed in segments and when it rotates these
colors mix and create the color white.
Why black?
In Genesis God, before creating light, also created darkness, he divided
the one from the other creating day and night.
Thus, even though they are opposites, light and darkness, just like black
and white, are in reality accomplices in a single vision. Therefore, if true
light is so-called white light, in order to design it we need only white and
black, its opposite and at the same time its accomplice.
A design of light can be made of these basic signs-interpretants, which, by
convention, represent light in ordinary language, in the language of science
and in creation myths.
An icon is always "degenerated" (in the mathematical sense), as
is the symbol and the index too, as demonstrated by Pierce on describing his
typology of signs. In our case, this "degenerated" character concerns
a presence in the icon of conventions relative not only and not so much to the
iconography of light, as to the verbal conventions according to which it is
possible to speak about light.
The icon of light is a hybrid of iconographic and verbal conventions.
The designs (Luciano Ponzio 1999)
We are reproducing Luciano Ponzio, Heavens Of
Light. We always start from a source of light which irradiates and illuminates
everything it meets.
In the first design entitled White light,
"pure color" (Plate 1), the source expands in the form of
straight lines that are uninterrupted throughout the whole plate. The signs
and decorations which are more intense and thicker near the source portray its
intensity.
The unascertainability, at a scientific level, between 'corpuscle' and 'wave',
represents itself in the design of light. Light also spreads in waves. This
is why the second design called Light and waves
(Plate 2) presents undulating or wavy signs with the light source irradiating
in straight lines with white marks contrasting on a black background.
In the drawing Light and an obstacle
(Plate 3), another physical experiment is taken into consideration, this time
Young's, in which if an obstacle is placed in front of a light source, new sources
are created. Another interesting element accompanies this design: an optical
effect which explains how sight produces rays and thus creates a new source,
this time opposed to light and which possesses not rays of light but visual
rays. These visual rays behave in the same way as rays of light. Visual rays
do not perceive the object which comes in between (in this case a hand) and
are projected into the background, putting it into focus. Thus light too does
not only 'see' the foreground, but if it manages to pass, it is projected onto
other planes. On the contrary, light is not able to 'see' or shed light beyond
an object with an opaque surface, if it is unable to make its rays pass through
it, just as we could never know through 'visual touch' alone whether somebody
is behind the house if we cannot see him!
It also refers to the speed of light, a speed which is notoriously superior
to that of sound; just consider a storm: we see the light of the flash of lightening
first and then comes the sound-noise of the thunder. They say that the maximum
speed of light is actually reached inside a prism, in the exact moment when
the white light passes and is broken up and projected onto a white surface forming
the spectrum (a band of seven conventional colors: red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo and violet).
The design Interference routes among light
sources (Plate 5) is also based on another interesting physics principle:
Young's interference principle. His experiment aims at explaining the phenomenon
of combination and interaction among different sources of light which tend to
cancel each other or to add to each other. Thus the signs portray different
sources of light, which combine and co-exist without prevailing over one another,
thereby maintaining an overall equilibrium.
The sixth drawing, Sun, Moon, Earth and Sirius
(Plate 6), portrays a planetary vision. The theme of this design is the discussion
on the colors of the planets and of the stars which surround our galaxy: in
his book Astronomica Manilius describes Sirius as being blue; on the
contrary, in his book Natural Phenomena Seneca maintains that Sirius is rubor,
that is red; Ptolemy in Almagest defined Sirius as being yellowish. The reasons
could be both of a cultural nature as well as a question of degree and possibility
of knowledge, but we could also hypothesize that beyond iconic approximations,
that is, approximations established on the basis of similarity, and beyond conventions,
motivations of an indexical order, in other words that there were also evolutions
in the stellar system, may have also influenced these 'descriptions'.
In the design entitled The fire within the
eyes (Plate 7) reference is made to Plato's narration in Timaeus,
a second version of Genesis. The story narrated by Timaeus, tells
of how a God entrusted his children with the task of creating humanity. The
first organs to be created were precisely the eyes which in order to be able
to shed light were inserted with just enough fire for them not to burn. The
design presents the visual ray (portrayed as a fire) as imagined by Plato, Empedocles
and others, which like a beam of light combines with environmental light (portrayed
as a large eye) and together they form a substance which is projected until
it encounters a surface and identifies its chr™ma, color and structure, and
takes it back to the observer.
In the eigth design called Artifical lights
(Plate 8), the circular and concentric signs overlap and start from different
sources covering the whole black sky. The same lights, broken up this time (the
refraction phenomena), are reflected in the sea, which is black too.
In Ray of light on a surface (Plate
9) we try to imagine a single ray of light which encounters an opaque surface,
lighting up the area it strikes. The violent sign in a straight line of the
ray of light which strikes the surfaces signifies the force of the impact and
the speed with which light penetrates.
The last drawing, And there was light (Genesis)
(Plate 10), evokes the moment in which light was created, partly removing the
darkness which covered the earth, creating day and night and thus also the first
day.
Overall the icons of light, and these designs testify to this, are made of
seen light, spoken light, portrayed light, mixing elements of iconicity, conventionality
and indexicality. Their eventual similarity with light is thus a "claim".
However, on an artistic level, their claim is above all that the image may be
valid in itself, may have value on its own account, as Peirce says of the icon,
that it might relate to light on the basis of similarity, in the sense of orience
and firstness. The claim is that these designs have meaning and value as signs
independently from what they are supposed to look like, without reference to
anything else but themselves. This is the claim of all artistic images, and
even more so when a question of designing light. The greatest possibility of
similarity with light rests in this claim to firstness, whether we consider
it scientifically as the original energy of the universe and absolute measurement
unit of speed, or mythically as the primum of creation.
