Although certain mechanisms of music have sometimes been used to approach painting, it should be made clear that these Piano Transcriptions have little to do with them, since painting and music are two universes that do not obey the same law, as Pierre Boulez would say.

The main space features three works of broad and luminous instrumentation where scale and colour play a major role. Considering their reduction to a domestic size and the contraction of colour and light, we could say that the works in the adjacent room dialogue with those three through the notion of transcription: as if the chromatic mass had been transcribed into the voice of a single instrument and the variations on the shiny black of a piano's lacquered finish.

There is no possible combination of prism and light that makes black possible, no place from which to glimpse remnants of black smoke in the rainbow. Is it a negation of light, the success of the reprobation of colour? Is it only the absence or the presence of a light other than light? There is always a dark brightness in black, but how can we not try to control darkness? How can we not make it difficult to look until we see what we cannot see? Can we do without chromatic vibration? Can we only see things when we see them?

It is never possible to embrace colour, all colour, without celebrating black, the non-colour that results from the complete absorption of visible light. But shiny black, with its crystal envelope, restrains its greed and restores all the light it absorbs.

Prudencio Irazabal, November 2024