Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, Arnaud Maggs 2005

Born in this city in 1926, Arnaud Maggs is now heading into his eightieth year of aesthetic production. Recently feted in Toronto, Maggs was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2006 Untitled Art Award gala. While he is perhaps best known for his multiple-pose, photographic portraits and 'catalogues' of graphic elements ranging from French hotel signs to death notices, Maggs' penchant for precise seriality has recently absorbed a new subject.

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa recently showed (and smartly purchased elements of) Arnaud Maggs Nomenclature. The Nomenclature of the title refers to Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, a field book produced at the turn of the 19th century by naturalist, Abram Werner (1750 - 1817). This little tome contains page after page of small colour swatches alongside a comparative set of descriptive terms taken from the animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds. This standard colour lexicon enabled scientists in different locales to identify specimens with descriptive terms that were centrally agreed upon. Essential as a base-line cataloguing tool in the field (Charles Darwin was one of its users), Werner's was nothing less than an attempt to make colour non-relative. A wonderful impossibility, of course... a chromatic hubris in which Maggs continues to delight as he reproduces page after page of the Werner's with his digitally corrected, full colour photographs.


Cercles Chromatiques, Arnaud Maggs 2005

As if the Werner's wasn't an intriguing enough attempt to 'capture' colour, Maggs has discovered yet another gem in the archives. The second aspect of the McLaughlin Gallery exhibition was Maggs' photographs of a rare document titled Cercles Chromatiques by M.E.Chevreul, published in 1861. Whereas Nomenclature addresses the descriptive worlds of animal, vegetable and mineral, Cercles Chromatiques serves as a purely theoretical application. It contains eleven colour wheels, each showing the full chromatic scale. Beginning with the second colour wheel, ten percent black is surprinted over the colour. This increases in increments of ten percent, until the last colour wheel is shown as a dense black, obscuring any evidence of the colour spectrum.

As the chromatic scale transforms into an achromatic scale, Maggs' watchful eye and steady shutter captures the slow, metaphorical movement from day to night, from positive to negative, from life to death, from light to darkness. Only someone with Maggs' sensitivity and longevity could make the exactitude of Chevreul's studious chromatiques into something so precisely poetic.