BOOK: Ad Reinhardt-Color Out of Darkness, Curated by James Turrell, Pace Publishing

What happens when an artist who spent his life painting the darkness meets an artist who builds monuments out of pure light? The answer is found in “Ad Reinhardt: Color Out of Darkness, Curated by James Turrell” by Pace Publishing, a stunning new monograph that documents the critically acclaimed 2022 exhibition at Pace Gallery. The project represents a profound, full-circle moment in American art history. In 1962, a young James Turrell attended a lecture by abstract painter Ad Reinhardt at the Pasadena Museum—a threshold encounter that deeply informed Turrell’s burgeoning philosophy on perception. Six decades later, Turrell paid homage to that influence, stepping into the role of curator to reframe Reinhardt’s legacy through his own signature medium: light.

At the heart of both artists’ practices is a radical rejection of the art object as a mere commodity or static image. Instead, both demand a slow, meditative looking. For the exhibition, Turrell designed a precise, immersive lighting concept specifically engineered to illuminate Reinhardt’s geometric, monochromatic “red,” “blue,” and “black” paintings. By manipulating the ambient light, Turrell did not merely showcase the canvases; he activated them.

The result is a contemporary manifestation of Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato technique—an experience where rigid borders dissolve, and the viewer is pulled into the liminal space “beyond the focus plane.” Under Turrell’s direction, the subtle, shifting nuances of Reinhardt’s paint layers reveal themselves not as flat color blocks, but as deep, architectural voids.

Capturing such an experiential, light-dependent exhibition in print is a notorious archival challenge, but Pace’s volume succeeds by treating the book as an extension of the gallery space itself. The monograph features extensive installation photography captured under varying lighting conditions, charting the chameleonic transformation of the gallery walls as the atmosphere shifts.

Rather than relying solely on traditional art-historical essays, the book curates a diverse chorus of voices. Contemporary artists, writers, scientists, and poets offer prose and poetry written in direct, visceral response to the physical experience of the show. The result is a multi-disciplinary exploration of human perception, making “Color Out of Darkness” an essential text for anyone invested in the past, present, and future of abstraction. -Dimitris Lempesis