This is a rare ‘Black Painting’ by Jolly Koh, the incorrigible master of colours. Not the dull monochromes of Kazimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt, or Goya’s macabre Black Paintings, of course. To Jolly Koh, there’s pulchritude in black, not totally black of course, because there’s a subtly imperceptible illumination that add nuances and titillate the imagination. Like Lord Byron’s marvelling at how Rembrandt made his darkness equal light. Darkness is oft something to be feared, the occult or something similarly sinister. But to Jolly Koh, ‘Darkness’ is like the Simon & Garfunkel Sound of Silence refrain, “my old friend”, a bosom pal one visits and revisits for succour and solace. A challenge to plunge the depths of the unknown, to make it known. It is a reassuring nocturnal cocoon, a safe space, a hideout, where one can be inconspicuously “not there”. Some may view it as a romantic night scene, and on a night like this, lovers embrace with caressing whispers, and everything lies between remembrance and forgetfulness. Artist-academician Jolly Koh has a chequered career in art, with tutelage at Hornsey College of Art and London University (England) and Indiana University (Masters, United States). He had taught at the Mara Institute of Technology (briefly), Gaya College in Sabah, Melbourne and Adelaide (TAFE College), and MSC College (now SeGi University). In 2017, he was given a major survey exhibition at MAP Publika, White Box (organised by Henry Butcher Art Auctioneers) Kuala Lumpur, accompanied by a book chronicling 60 years of his life paintings.