Arnaud Maggs: Nomenclature.

ARNAUD MAGGS

NOMENCLATURE

THE ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN GALLERY, OSHAWA

GIL MCELROY

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While Newtonian physics may have prompted the understanding that, within the electromagnetic spectrum, a given colour is actually light of a specific wavelength, in the world of everyday experience colour is entirely dependent upon human perception. We all see things differently. In the two recent works that compose the exhibition Nomenclature, Toronto-based artist Arnaud Maggs explores the highly subjective nature of the chromatic beast.

Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul (2006) utilizes a little-known 1861 publication of a series of colour wheels by French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul. Aware that the perception of specific colours depended on those that were immediately adjacent, Chevreul created a set of colour wheels for entirely practical reasons: to be used in industry.

Maggs treats Chevreul's colour wheels photographically, creating large digital images mounted on panels of aluminum and exhibiting the entire series of 10 wheels as a continuous sequence across the gallery wall. And sequence is critical, for Chevreul's original wheels--each of which comprises 72 spokes of individual colours--plot out a course of degradation as 10-percent black is added to each until, by the final wheel, they reach the state of the absence of colour. Seeing the wheels in continuous succession (as opposed to flipping between the individual pages, as the work was originally structured) lends Maggs' piece a powerfully abstract quality only held in check by the flaws of the original work (creases in the pages, for example), which are reproduced here in magnified form and so take on a vital visual significance.

Werner' s Nomenclature of Colours (2005) too finds its source in a historical work, again one informed by the practical necessity of speaking a shared language and having meaning in common when referring to as subjective a thing as colour. Abraham Werner was an 18th-century geologist who, working with Isaac Newton's colour theory, devised a handbook of colours for use by mineralogists that was subsequently adapted for use in other branches of science. Charts of Werner's colours were applied to the anatomical structure of humans and animals, to things of the botanical realm and to minerals. And so Werner's original small, square sample of the colour "Skimmed milk White" is variously made to correspond to the "White of the Human Eyeballs," the "Back of the Petals of Blue Hepatica" and to "Common Opal."

Again, Maggs digitally photographed the 13 individual pages of the charts, mounting large prints on aluminum panels to be shown as an interrelated sequence. Where Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul assumed a near-abstract reading, the textual emphasis of Werner' s Nomenclature of Colours prevents any such interpretation. However, Maggs' enlargement allows the viewer to see that the grid structure of the original work, with its colour samples and texts set within an orderly scheme of boxes, and the numerical arrangement of the whole work as it progresses from "Snow White" (No. 1) to "Blackish Brown" (No. 110), contrast sharply with the uneven application of the colour samples themselves, the aspiration of scientific objectivity neatly blunted by the messy inconsistencies of the human. Maggs' images of the pages brilliantly aestheticize the resulting tension and tug of war between Werner's attempt at colour empiricism (as dated as it may now appear) and the subjective nature of perception. Seeing really is in the believing.

Arnaud Maggs, Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul, 2006. UltraChrome digital photographs on paper mounted on aluminium (detail). Courtesy of the artist and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa