Horizontal Depth³ — “This Is Not the Place We Go to Die. It’s Where We Are Born”

A new iteration of Frederik De Wilde’s blackest black art, Horizontal Depth³, was exhibited in 2018 at the first Minimalism landmark exhibition in Southeast Asia, set across two sites: National Gallery Singapore and ArtScience Museum. Led by National Gallery Singapore, the exhibition features over 150 works that explore the history and legacy of this groundbreaking art movement, which continues to inform a wide range of art forms and practitioners across the world today.

• https://www.nationalgallery.sg/exhibitions/minimalism-space-light-object

Nothingness and the Void are concepts that appear in the Eastern philosophies that influenced Minimalism. Still, they are also essential ideas in science. The vacuum and the void are central features of physics, which have helped shape our understanding of reality. The emptiness that permeates the universe, and the structure of atoms, has long given artists and scientists pause for thought. Whilst quantum mechanics teaches us that empty space in nature is never truly empty, undulating as it is with vacuum fluctuations and invisible quantum fields, it is still extraordinary to ponder the sheer sparsity of the cosmos. These ideas that bridge philosophy and science fascinated Minimalist artists, inspiring many to find ways of representing the void. Artists today can collaborate with scientists to create work that presents avoid and gives the viewer the closest possible experience of what true ‘nothingness’ might be. Echoing the circular form of the ensō explored elsewhere in the exhibition and visually evocative of a black hole, this newly commissioned work uses De Wilde’s material to create an encounter with the void, an idea that resonates in Minimalist art, Eastern philosophy and science. The carbon nanotubes used to make the artwork comprise 99.99% air and 0.01% carbon and capture light at all frequencies. When gazing at this artwork, viewers are literally looking into nothing – a void space – and the closest approximation of emptiness that is possible to experience on the Earth. In the same way that Malevich hoped his Black Square painting would free art of the obligation to depict the real, De Wilde intends his work to open up a space of imagination for the viewer. As the artist notes, “it is the ultimate celebration of the unknown.”

In 2010, he engineered a new colour believed to be the blackest black in the world. Working closely with Rice University and  a NASA scientist, De Wilde grew his ‘blackest black’ material inside a nanotechnology laboratory. He used it to create several black paintings that directly refer to Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s iconic 1915 painting, Black Square, widely regarded as one of the most important precursors to Minimalism.

Horizontal Depth³ was commissioned by the ArtScience Museum Singapore for the exhibition Minimalism: Space. Light. Object (16 November 2018 to 14 April 2019). The work is currently in a private collection.Diameter: 2 meters. Materials: original blackest-black ‘paint’, carbon nanotubes, and stainless steel.

Other artists in the exhibition included Anish Kapoor (India), Austin Forbord and Shelley Trott (directors), Carmen Herrera (Cuba), Charwei Tsai (Taiwan), Chen Shiau-Peng (Pescadores Island), Donald Judd (USA), Frederik De Wilde (Belgium), Gerard Byrne (Republic of Ireland), Jeppe Hein (Denmark), Jeremy Sharma (Singapore), Joan Jonas (USA), Mary Miss (USA), Mona Hatoum (Lebanon), Morgan Wong (Hong Kong), Olafur Eliasson (Denmark), Richard Long (UK), Simone Forti (Italy), Song Dong (China), Tan Ping (China), Tawatchai Puntusawasdi (Thailand), teamLab (Japan), Wang Jian (China), Yvonne Rainer (USA), Zhang Yu (China), Zhou Hong Bin (China).

Colonialism, the Void, and the Post-Natural: A Reflection in Blackest-Black

The entanglement of colonialism, post-colonialism, and decolonial thought extends beyond the material politics of resource extraction to the very ontology of artistic representation. Frederik De Wilde’s exploration of the blackest black, a nanotechnology-engineered material that absorbs nearly all light, operates within this contested terrain. More than a formalist inquiry into voids and perception, his work interrogates the histories that shape how and why we see—or fail to see—certain realities. The materiality of this engineered blackness serves as a conceptual void, gesturing not only toward the unknown but also toward the epistemic ruptures of colonial history, where entire worldviews were forcibly obscured or erased. The use of cutting-edge materials developed in collaboration with NASA places De Wilde’s work within the contemporary structures of scientific research and technological advancement—fields historically intertwined with colonial expansion and militarization.

A crucial point of historical resonance lies in Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), often considered a foundational work of abstraction and Minimalism. Recent microscopic analysis of one version of Black Square housed at Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery has revealed a handwritten inscription beneath its layers of paint, believed to read: “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.” This phrase is likely a reference to Alphonse Allais’ 1897 satirical monochrome Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit (Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night), a work that, while regarded as a joke in European avant-garde circles, was unmistakably racist. If Malevich indeed inscribed this reference, it implicates Black Square in a dialogue with Allais’ work, raising critical questions about the racial and colonial underpinnings of early modernist abstraction. While Black Square has long been championed as an autonomous break from representation, this inscription exposes a more complicated history—one in which the erasure of Blackness is not merely an aesthetic choice but a gesture with colonial resonance.

De Wilde’s blackest black further extends this discourse into the post-natural realm. Unlike Malevich’s black pigment, which obscures and conceals, De Wilde’s nano-engineered blackness operates as an abyss that actively absorbs, consuming light itself. If Malevich’s Black Square hinted at an invisible racialized narrative beneath its surface, De Wilde’s work confronts the politics of visibility and materiality in a scientific age where the ability to manipulate matter at the nanoscale introduces new forms of power, control, and ethical ambiguity.

In the same way that natural water has been transformed from a shared resource into a privatized commodity, the pursuit of ultimate blackness raises urgent questions about technological supremacy, artistic innovation, and the ways in which colonial legacies persist within contemporary scientific and aesthetic practices. De Wilde’s work, therefore, does not simply depict a void—it stages a confrontation .with the historical, material, and political conditions that have long determined who has the power to see, and who is left unseen.