Avant-garde film and video artist obsessed with the colour black
The artist Aldo Tambellini, who has died aged 90, was obsessed with the colour black. “Black to me is like a beginning,” he said in 1967. “Black gets rid of the historical definition. Black is a state of being blind and more aware. Black is a oneness with birth. Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.”
Typical of Tambellini’s avant-garde multimedia work is Black Trip, made in 1965, a highly disorientating short film mixing kinescope (where the artist recorded the screen of a television on 16mm film), together with painting directly on the negative, to create five minutes of flickering black-and-white visual noise, complemented by a headache-inducing, droning soundtrack. Slightly more restful was Black Is, a film installation made the same year. To the sound of a heartbeat Tambellini projected abstract forms on to a black background.