When one activates suminagashi (“Sumi” means ink, “Nagashi” to make float), at least three things come into play: color, with a choice among the various options offered; the perpetual, hypnotic movement; the shapes that will arise, generated by the code, to which we give an impulse.
The Colors
Let us first give credit where it is due: a large portion of our knowledge about the history of color is owed to Michel Pastoureau. This eminent medievalist historian began studying color in the 1980s, at a time when it drew little attention. It was pioneering work. It is worth emphasizing how much the history of color and the interest it now mobilizes owe to his research.
Thanks to him, we know that color is an extremely complex field, at the crossroads of many disciplines. There are of course optical phenomena, since that is how colors are perceived. There is chemistry, which makes it possible to develop new pigments, from prehistoric natural pigments to artificial pigments. Color also invites philosophy, literature, and, of course, the history of art. And not to forget that the perception of colors has its own history. We do not perceive colors in the same way in ancient Egypt as we do today, for example. The symbolism of color is therefore always connected to a moment in history and to a particular society. It evolves over time and varies by region.
Let us take the example of the four colors offered in the suminagashi from a Western perspective. These are important colors: black, blue, red and green.
Black
Black is one of the earliest pigments used by prehistoric humans. It was easy to obtain, notably thanks to charcoal. Like all colors, black carries meanings that can be contradictory. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, it has been associated with the underworld. This association deepens in the Christian world, with black linked to sin, in opposition to divine light. With the Reformation in the sixteenth century, black acquired new meanings. It took on a more positive connotation as a symbol of sobriety. A long series of meanings then followed: the black of Romantic torments, the black of the industrial bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century (one can think of the famous Portrait of Monsieur Bertin painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1832), or the black of rockers and punks in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, black is a color that is regarded as masculine, austere, and spiritual.
Blue
The suminagashi also offers blue, a color that has been Westerners’ favorite since the late nineteenth century. In our minds, it symbolizes peace. Yet this prominence given to blue did not always exist. Curiously, there was no word to name blue in Ancient Greek. Blue was considered a kind of derivative of black. It is a striking example of the fluidity of color perception. Blue, however, experiences a significant rise in importance in the Middle Ages within the Christian world. It is associated with God, the God of light, in Christian theology. Little by little, it displaces gold, which had been widely used since late antiquity in religious representations. Blue thus becomes the color of the Virgin’s mantle. By extension, it becomes the color of the kings of France, at least in France.
During the Reformation, many colors were condemned by Protestants, notably red, symbolizing all the excesses and exuberance of the Catholic Church. But blue remained accepted, alongside black.
Red
Red and green are two colors particularly interesting, because they are highly ambivalent. Red carries a very strong symbolism: it represents blood, life, and death. Red pigments were among the first to be used by prehistoric humans. Since antiquity, it has been associated with fire and blood, then very quickly with religious and military power. This meaning has traversed the centuries.
In the Christian world, it is of course linked to the blood of Christ. Red is therefore the color of martyrs, and by extension, that of the popes and cardinals. It was not until the 1789 Revolution that red became a more popular color, more closely associated with the people. It became the color of workers’ parties, then that of the Soviet Union.
Green
Green is therefore an ambivalent color, just like red. For a long time, green was obtained using verdegris, a highly toxic copper compound. In contact with sweat, for instance, the green dye of fabrics could transform into poison. This instability also appears in the symbolism of green. It is a color associated with notions such as change, fate, or play.
Green did not become the color of nature until fairly late. One must especially await landscape painting in the nineteenth century. For a long time, colors associated with nature tended to be earthy tones. Today, green is the color of greenwashing: simply a green-washed packaging can give the impression that a product is environmentally friendly and good for the environment.
By using the different colors in this suminagashi, these symbolic elements that our culture has internalized come into play. If you click on red, you feel that you are introducing more vivacity into the composition. When you click on blue, a more soothing dimension arises.
Movement
The suminagashi is a Japanese technique for marbling paper. Yet an interesting paradox arises: the term “color” comes from the Latin celare, meaning “to hide.” It is thus a matter of emergence and unveiling of forms more than a covering. Yet the shapes and colors move before gradually disappearing. These ephemeral movements create a hypnotic effect.
At the start, when you open the page, you notice blotches appearing and evolving on their own, without any intervention. You can then intervene yourself by making gestures more or less strong and brisk. This pleasure of gesture through color obviously has something childlike about it.
As an art historian, this exercise evokes gestural painting from the 1950s and 1960s, lyrical abstraction in Europe with Georges Mathieu, for example, or Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It marks an important moment in the history of painting: artists then invented a new way of interacting with the canvas, not necessarily through direct brush contact, but by projecting paint directly onto the support. Even though the focus is more on dilution than on covering, one still finds a sense of that gesture here.
Visual Effects
The visual effects produced by the code aim first to imitate the dilution of ink on a sheet of paper. They also provoke the appearance of a multitude of images. One might think of moiré on silk, with its wavering effects on fabric. Moiré is a motif that enjoyed great popularity in the 1960s, initially in optical art — also known as Op Art — and later in psychedelic art. To learn more about this vogue for moiré and the marbling effects in art, we can only recommend the art historian Arnauld Pierre’s essay Magic Moirés (Macula Editions, 2022).
We know of Victor Hugo as a writer; now let us speak of his drawings. It is often forgotten that he was also an exceptional draftsman of great modernity. In his ink washes, Hugo assigns a central role to stains and accidents in the emergence of images. This practice is linked to his passion for spiritualism. He would also sometimes place ink blotches on a sheet of paper, fold it, then unfold it, to spark his literary inspiration.
Victor Hugo’s graphic work influenced the Surrealists at the start of the twentieth century. This Sunday, an exciting exhibition is dedicated to the English artist and writer Brion Gysin at the Paris Modern Art Museum. Born in 1916, Gysin moved among the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s. It was there that he discovered decalcomanie, developed by Surrealist painter Óscar Domínguez. This technique involves applying ink or paint to a polished surface, such as a glass plate. A sheet of paper is then pressed onto this surface. Random motifs appear. The Surrealists enjoyed finding in these random forms pareidolia. Pareidolia is the mental process of recognizing familiar shapes, such as a face, an animal, or a silhouette, in natural elements like the sky, a rock, or a tree. Gysin himself used decalcomanie to evoke the movement of clouds in the sky. These hypnotic movements echo the shapes in perpetual motion in our suminagashi.
If the shapes in Victor Hugo’s blotches, Brion Gysin’s decalcomanies, pareidolia, or suminagashi captivate us as much, it is because they resonate with our own mental images, sketching an interior landscape that is at once intimate and collective.