24/07/2019
What if a world—a room—is bereft of color and, in an instance, one is suddenly confronted, flooded, and embraced by it?
This is the titillating idea behind Rainbow Room, the solo exhibition of Crystal Tranquilino as she contemplates the vast divide between presence and absence, the actual and the imagined, what is true to the eye and what exists merely as an abstract term.
Inspired by Mary’s Room, a thought experiment by the philosopher Frank Jackson in which he posits “a (hypothetical) woman named Mary who lives her entire life inside a room void of color. Because of her fascination with this element she has never had the pleasure of experiencing before, she devotes years studying and learning about color…Everything that needs to be known about any color, she knows like the back of her hand.”
But Mary’s fate is soon to change when, “one uneventful day, a door suddenly opens out to the world where color exists. Mary steps outside of her monochromatic room and, for the first time, experiences color with her own eyes.”
With this scenario in mind, the artist raises pivotal questions: “Did the experience of seeing colors change or alter the information that which Mary was already made aware of?” “Does personal experience add an irreplaceable aspect of understanding that no amount of information can replicate?”
In contemplating Mary’s Room and asking these questions, Tranquilino recasts the vitality, importance, and urgency of color not only in life but in art. Rather than being an element that is implicit in the objects that we see, color becomes its own presence, expressed as viscous and opaque element, contingent on and subservient to nothing.
Color, as envisioned by the artist, becomes all the more insistent and pervasive when set against the monochromatic room of the space, which recedes from the eye and offers the staging ground to the element without which, to paraphrase a quote that refers to music, life would be a mistake.
Isolating and presenting color this way in this suite of works, which show both the impulse of figuration and abstraction, Tranquilino evinces a sense of curiosity and wonder in which we experience the million shades, hues, and tonalities we simply take for granted as we negotiate through daily life. Perception, as what this exhibition proposes, is not just a matter of seeing things but arresting colors in their constant expressions and evocations: a visual symphony whose very idea lies on being experienced in order for it to be true.
Writeup by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
