(PERMANENCE) 4/7 — MAGENTA
Not a mineral. Coal tar. Oxidised aniline, 1859: the second synthetic dye in history after mauveine — and the powder is dark green, turning red only by oxidising. The name comes from a battle. Patented as fuchsine, for the flower, then renamed magenta for the French victory at Magenta, in Lombardy, June 1859. A colour named after a battlefield, now one of the four primaries in every printer on earth.
It contains no metal. The only one of the seven: it has nothing to sign with. That is why the reflection stays white at every stage, while in the other six the iridescence takes the colour of the metal.
And it does not become another colour: it leaves. It is a lake — colorant precipitated onto an inert support, alum, barium sulfate. When the colorant is destroyed the support remains, and that is not the white of paper: it is a warm, dirty white. It was removed from watercolours, replaced by colours with better lightfastness.
The by-products did the rest. To cut costs the aniline was oxidised with arsenic acid; the process yielded London purple, an arsenic compound between thirty and fifty percent, sold as an insecticide. And the workmen in the fuchsine factories developed bladder cancer.
Here, the more the colour dies the more the drawing agitates: once only black and white remain the animation multiplies, three more harmonics, each finer and faster. And a blade of pure white reflection holds at the crest of the relief — that is the surface of the varnish, not the matter beneath. It stays white at any stage.
Unique generative work. Canvas2D, per-pixel height field, real-time light. 3000×3000, infinite loop, no controls.
