R Magazine, Ex-TeenArt_Issue 1_Authenticity Jun. 2015 | Page 34

ACHROME (BLACK
AND WHITE) OR
T H E C U LT U R A L
SYMBOLISM OF
COLORS
Black and white: What do these colors evoke? Both refer to particular symbolic universes dependently of the culture of
which we belong. In occidental culture, white is associated to virtues, values, to positive concepts: Purity, peace, (which
symbolize the dove), Beauty (the Skin of Alabaster, of which the poets of the renaissance make the praise), innocence,
candor, chastity, virginity (the dress of antic vestals and of young married is white),good: God is bright just as well is the
paradise unlike hells, called also : black , somber, kingdom of shadow ,murky stay; Angels are also white brought by an
aura unlike black angel of darkness :Satan, who seduces and bring to evil, leads to loss. White magic happens on powers
and spirits of good, while black magic is accountable as occultism, witchcraft, Satanism; it is evil, diabolic and bear in an
occult manner on powers and spirits of evil.
Unlike white, black refers generally to negative, to what frighten and that should be absolutely rejected: dark and evil
forces, sin, concealment, night, nightmare, death, frightening mystery and by the way fascinating (in psychoanalysis,
black continent, an expression inherited from Freud, designate womanhood in its more obscure face, mysterious,
unreachable), unknown, melancholy, spleen1 .According to theory of temperament of old medicine, black bile is one of
four moods located in the spleen meant to produce sadness. The atrabil or the melancholic has a pessimistic vision of
life; he sees things in the wrong way .He is associated to Saturn which, according to astrologers is a dark planet, grey or
black, enemy of humans and source of resentment and of despair for those who were born under its sign, conception to
which agrees Paul Verlaine with its nostalgic poem composing the collection precisely entitled Saturnine Poems.
White oppose to soiling, dirt, impurity as well as physic as moral which would be on the black side, but it can designate
as well, by i ts intrinsic ambivalence, old age (white hair), death (bones, shroud, specters and ghosts dressed, in the
collective imaginary, of white sheets), anxiety (that one blank page).Being fundamentally neutral, it suggests absence,
emptiness, silence. We can view it as reality itself, cleared of any illusory color, as internal whiteness, without mask. It is
thus, at once, light, brightness and paleness, lividity, life and death, happiness and mourning.
Black can be as well the expression of life as of death, It can be the promise of a renewal, of a new step and suggest the
infinite of possibilities, regard to the infinity of the universe and the space. As it is written by Derek Jarman, the author
of Chroma, the book of colors published in 1994: Beyond galaxies extends this essential darkness from where bright stars.
[…].Black is unlimited, imagination gallop in darkness, and palpable dreams run through the night.