Black & White
Monumental spatial installation · 2022
- ArtistDavid Spriggs
- LocationNoor Riyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- CommissionRoyal Commission for Riyadh City
- DimensionsEach: 382 × 458 × 222 cm
150 × 180 × 87 in - MaterialsAcrylic paint on ninety layered transparencies, lightboxes, and frameworks
- PhotographyDavid Spriggs
Black & White presents two monumental fields as opposing spatial presences. Separated by a central passage, the works require the viewer to move between them, occupying the interval where their apparent opposition becomes unstable.
Black and white are often treated as absolute terms: darkness and light, absence and totality, negation and affirmation. The installation gives those abstractions scale and volume, then complicates them through transparency, movement, and changing viewpoint.
The title also invokes black and white thinking, a psychological structure in which complexity is divided into mutually exclusive positions. Here, the viewer is placed physically between the two, within a space that neither field can possess alone.
Video Documentation: Black & White at Noor Riyadh
Two symbolic fields
Black appears dense, absorptive, and gravitational. White appears radiant, expansive, and exposed. Yet neither remains visually stable. Light passes through both volumes, revealing that each apparent mass is composed of separated marks and transparent intervals.
The works therefore resist a simple equation of black with absence and white with presence. Both are materially dispersed and optically produced. Their difference is forceful, but never complete.
Between two absolutes
The central passage is not an empty division between two objects. It is the conceptual and perceptual centre of the installation. Moving through it, the viewer sees each field transform while becoming conscious of the other as an opposing presence.
From a frontal position the marks cohere into turbulent volumes. From the sides, both images separate into parallel planes. The apparent certainty of each colour is undone by the visible conditions through which it is produced.
Colour, power, and perception
The installation treats colour as a symbolic structure that shapes judgement, emotion, and attention. Black and white organise visual culture through contrast, but they also carry social, political, and psychological histories that cannot be reduced to formal opposition.
By giving the two colours separate bodies and placing the viewer between them, the work turns opposition into an embodied problem. Meaning shifts with position, and certainty gives way to relation.
Commission context
Black & White was commissioned by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City and presented at Noor Riyadh in 2022. The festival presentation was curated by Hervé Mikaeloff, Dorothy Di Stefano, and Jumana Ghouth.