Black(out) & White(ness)
Exploration of patterns and color in art and design
Personal Exploration – Art Direction & Visual Research
a visual exploration of contrast, perception, and reduction.
The project investigates how beauty emerges—or collapses—when stripped of color, narrative comfort, and decorative excess.
At its core, the work operates between two poles: light and shadow, black and white, attraction and unease. By removing color as an emotional shortcut, the focus shifts to form, structure, texture, and tension.
Concept & Approach
The series deliberately avoids harmony for harmony’s sake. Instead, it questions the fine line between beauty and kitsch, between iconic imagery and visual overload. Familiar subjects—faces, animals, symbols—are deconstructed, fragmented, and reassembled to challenge expectation and meaning.
Reduction plays a central role. Each composition follows a process of subtraction: fewer colors, fewer visual rules, fewer explanations. What remains is intention.
Agency: Freelance
My Role: Freelance Art Director, Freelance Illustrator
Visual Language
Black and white are not treated as neutral design choices, but as active forces.
Light defines form. Shadow creates ambiguity. Together they generate optical tension and subtle illusion. Graphic elements, typography, and mathematical references are introduced sparingly—not as decoration, but as counterweights to the organic imagery. The result is a controlled collision of intuition and system, emotion and structure.
Outcome
Black(out) & White(ness) is not about answers. It’s about sharpening perception. The project serves as an ongoing visual research space—where form replaces color, restraint replaces noise, and meaning is created through contrast rather than explanation.
Freelance
Private
Freelance Art Director, Freelance Illustrator
© Christoph Gey
