Filipe Raposo - Obsidiana (2022)

ØBSIDIANA vol.2 belongs to a trilogy of discs that starts from the artistic reflection on the influence of 3 colors: red, black, and white. This ternary system has played a symbolic role since Classical Antiquity.

In literature, the predominance of red, black, and white is profoundly evident. In tales and fables, it serves to distinguish characters and social functions: the red associated with warriors, the black associated with work, and the white associated with the priestly function.
Black was contested for a long time as a color. With Newton, the chromatic revolution took place and black lost its status as color, returning to its place in the 19th century. XX with Modernism. Throughout history its path has been irregular: it has been associated with death and mourning; from a poor tone, it became a luxurious, sophisticated color and elegant with the improvement of the pigments; suggesting dignity, power and mystery. In Egypt, black was the symbol of fertility. It is synonymous with cave and abyss, with the bowels of the earth; it is linked to darkness and primordial chaos; the obscurity of origins precedes creation in all religions. Color of condemnation, it also becomes the color of renunciation of vanity. It rebels against the red of excesses, sin and luxury of the chromoclast Protestant reformers.

The fear of the night and the search for light has been present since our prehistory. Poetically, in the “dark night of the soul” the luminous pitch of self-understanding is revealed. The symbolism of øbsidian is linked to the igneous rock – the stone of fire. Obsidian forms when lava, the material from which it originates, cools rapidly without allowing most of its compounds to crystallize. Used as a mirror or ornamental object, the ability to form cutting blades of high hardness made it used as a cutting tool, in ritual circumcisions due to its sharpness and maneuverability, as well as in arrowheads.

Perceiving color — colors — and its symbolism has been one of the fundamental questions throughout this reflection, transformed into restlessness. In this sound essay, color and music are intimately linked in what is, inevitably, my symbolic-artistic universe.