Black Hole | Simona Kasprowicz

Curatorial Summary

In Black Hole, the abdomen is the most insistent part of the painting because it contains almost no image. A dense black oval occupies the centre of the figure, set sharply against the reds and magentas around it. The rest of the body is built through colour, gesture and modelling; the belly is left as a dark, nearly flat field.

The pose gathers around that interruption. The legs open beneath it, the hands meet along its edge, and the torso rises above. Nothing covers the black form. The body seems arranged around it.

Its flatness unsettles the volume of the pregnant figure. Where the abdomen should project outward, the painting appears to withdraw. Flesh, modelling and detail stop abruptly at the oval’s border. The title sharpens this effect without turning the form into a literal image of a black hole: the centre draws the eye in and gives nothing back.

Within Shekhinah in Labor, pregnancy is organised here around an interior that cannot be pictured. The black oval does not recede into absence. It remains the most forceful element of the composition precisely because representation ends there.

artist
statement

The black shape had to be absolute.

I left the belly flat, without modelling or anything represented inside it. The rest of the body could remain saturated, physical and visibly worked through paint. At the centre, I wanted that activity to stop.

The composition developed around the oval. The open legs and the placement of the hands keep returning the eye to it, while the reds intensify the separation between the body and the black field.

I kept resisting the impulse to add detail there. The contrast was enough. Red gave the figure density; the black removed it at the centre.

Once that surface was in place, adding an image inside the belly would have weakened it. The work depended on leaving that part of the painting unresolved by representation.