After the reflection

A glance at the newest works by Idris Khan makes his earlier “resistance to color” seem almost unimaginable. Yet in the first half of this decade, during the enforced stillness of the Covid-19 quarantine, this deeply urban artist found himself attuned to the colors shifting around him in the countryside. That heightened attention to color, when it converged with Khan’s longstanding engagement with Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons — a work in which Vivaldi seeks to give musical expression to the passage of time — set a new body of work in motion.

At the heart of Khan’s process is a piece of software that translates tone and color into musical notation: this blue is that note, this green is another. That system of translation became the foundation for the work — and it deepened further when Khan encountered Monet’s late paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Between 1915 and 1926, Monet painted eight monumental panels tracking the passage of sunlight across his water garden from dawn to dusk. Each panel is a different chapter in light’s daily story.

The starting point for After the reflection is one of those panels: The Water Lilies – Green Reflections (Reflets verts, 1915–1926). From it, Khan selected four key colors and ran each through his software, producing musical notation for every hue. As the publication accompanying the exhibition notes, this “musical translation of Monet’s attempts to freeze the changing colours of sunlight reflected on his ‘water garden’ over a single day speaks to Vivaldi’s attempt to capture the fluctuating energies across a different unit of time: the four seasons of the solar calendar. Both share Khan’s interest in capturing time through abstracted rhythm and form.”

The four large screenprints that make up After the reflection each present a musical score window, overprinted text, and a horizon band of background color at the base. The background colors were applied using three layers of vinyl ink screens originally developed for Khan’s earlier Four Seasons project, while the musical score and text were built using three letterpress plates. The process is deliberately laborious: each plate must be hand-inked for every new sheet printed. This method allows the works to be made with the same inks Khan uses when physically stamping his unique works, achieving a comparable depth of detail and material presence.

What After the reflection offers, in the end, is a record of multiple acts of translation: color into notation, light into sound, the transient into the fixed. To look at these prints is to sense, somewhere beneath their surfaces, both the shimmer of Monet’s pond and the measured cadence of Vivaldi’s strings.