We might think we know the colour of dust. Wisps of grey at the edges of rooms, a dull powder that coats unloved surfaces, it is a trace of our bodies (our skin cells, hair, bacteria) as they rub against the world (pollen, mites, soil). Household dust has no use and no beauty: it must be prevented against, swept away. Dust also appears memorably in Genesis as a reminder of the transience of mortal flesh: you are dust, and to dust you shall return. No wonder we are so phobic about its presence in our homes.

Maximilian Rödel’s new presentation, titled Arcane Dust, eschews this ordinary domestic detritus: it is arcane, and therefore precious, instilled with mysterious knowledge. This adjective might seem to endow Rödel’s dust with biblical connotations, death being the most arcane (though universal) of human experiences. But such equivalences are subverted by Rödel’s unexpected use of colour. Charcoal and ash, what we might associate with dust, are lifted by subtle tonal variations of maroon, rust, blush, peach and violet. Rödel’s reimagining of the substance brings to mind the historian John Gage’s reference to the Ancient Greek astronomer Cleomedes in his seminal 1993 study Colour and Culture. Cleomedes, Gage writes, pointed out that the sun is never simply yellow, it is ‘whitish or pallid, now red like ochre or blood, now a golden or even a greenish yellow and only sometimes the colour of fire.’ Cleomedes looked at the sun until the received wisdom about its characteristics fell away. Rödel extracts new colour from his subject matter through a similarly tenacious attention and arrives at a sense of any object’s diverse, shifting visuality that echoes the conclusions drawn by Cleomedes.

The titles of Rödel’s paintings suggest movement amongst different scales and materials, encompassing the titular dust as well as atmospheric and geological phenomena, landscape and architecture. Together the titles establish these paintings as vast interconnected spaces through which whispered voices, glances and emotions flash. Are these presences human, animal or something more ancient, fauna and flora from another epoch altogether? Looking at these paintings, thousands of years of history recede. Rödel’s works are united by a sense of deep time, not only indicated by the titles (subjects are ancient, prehistoric) but also in the luminosity and stillness of the canvases, which appear to look back to an era before human civilisation.

If we have sight, colour is the primary sense through which we apprehend the world. Rödel’s radiant, absorbing canvases remind us that this is as true now as it was for our homo sapiens ancestors. Rödel chooses meteorological events (sunsets, storms) that have occurred throughout history to suggest a shared experience with organisms that might otherwise feel hopelessly remote. What did the earliest predators see as they hunted? What sensory data did they amass as they moved through their austere, unforgiving landscapes? Much has changed in the billions of years since organisms began to multiply and flourish on earth. Yet Rödel’s work insists that what we share, what has persisted, is colour and light. Two paintings titled Prehistoric Sunset (subtitled Anterat and Growth of Soil) emphasise the remarkable fact that light from the most distant stars in the observable universe can be billions of years old. The light we see at night is a portal into an era before the Anthropocene. Could a painting produce a similar doorway — a connection between the present and distant past? If all marks of modernity are pared back, if a painting becomes nothing but the interrelation of colour and light, fundamentals that have underlaid all life before and after major industrial and geological change, then, perhaps.

This group of paintings belong together because of rhythms and harmonies in their palette. Pink from one canvas deepens before reappearing in another; particles of grey swirl across canvases as though carried by wind through a shared sky. Throughout Rödel’s work, colour, titles and form — an intricately constructed dissolve that has the appearance of formlessness — subtly interact. Take the title painting, Arcane Dust. The full meaning of the first word, with its etymological root in abstractions such as enclosure and containment (arcere) as well as concrete things like a chest and box (arca), proposes another function for the canvas. It is not merely a surface onto which paint is applied in service of an image, but a repository for thinking about colour that is sealed off from the external world.

If these paintings are thinking, what are their preoccupations? They might at first seem to withhold their knowledge, to stand apart, to resist any attempts at sense-making made by the casual viewer. However, an (arguably arcane) set of philosophical argument these paintings resonate with is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories of colour, distilled into his 1950 treatise Remarks on Colour. Wittgenstein concerns himself with problems of opacity, transparency, saturation, tonal differences and the tension between colour words and colour perception, exploring them through numbered propositions that take the form of questions. ‘There is the glow of red-hot and of white-hot,’ Wittgenstein writes in a characteristic enquiry, ‘but what would brown-hot and grey-hot look like?’ Rödel’s paintings embody these kinds of questions. They are inadvertent models, — abstract, oblique diagrams, you might say — that bear the imprint of Wittgenstein’s thinking. To use Prehistoric Sunset (Growth of the Soil) as an example, the title of which implies the rising temperature that comes with dawn, as well as the heat of fertilisation, what would maroon-hot look like, or violet-hot? Rödel’s brooding blues and reds, their telegraphing of sensation and affect — warmth, light, peacefulness — offer one possible answer. Or, turning to Ancient Ground — though any of Rödel’s paintings would ask the same — the simple question arises: what colour is this? These are experiments and extended meditations on the essence of colour. One colour, peach, infused with another, blue or violet, arguably no longer has the same essential properties as its undiluted form. A transformation has taken place: new terminology must be created, and this is partly what Rödel achieves in his paintings. A mixture of pale yellowy pink, lilac and charcoal might simply be called Ancient Ground. Maroon, bluish grey and rust might form another chromatic neologism, by the name of Whispering Tempest. Rödel’s paintings constitute a palaeolithic colour chart comprised of hybrid hues and idiosyncratic labels.

Rödel’s paintings are also always translations of ineffable interior states into tangible, visual forms. They at once invite and thematise attention. Rödel’s titles occasionally reflect on this aspect of the viewing experience, and reflect on the similarities between attention and distinct forms of religious experience. Animism, an ancient form of belief system that imagined communication between humans and their natural surroundings, is implied in Voice of Stone. Sacred Wall likewise calls up images of prayer and ritual. The structuring principle of Rödel’s work, the dissolve, is put to dramatic use in Whispering Tempest, which powerfully evokes the susurration of a storm. But the title also recalls instances of divine instruction carried by weather, not uncommon in biblical text. Clouds of peach and livid float through Unforeseen X , transforming the painting into a crystal ball ready to be scried. The self-conscious ambiguity of these paintings, their aura of of elusive meaning and their captivating presence, together instil them with an air of mysticism, the esoteric — or, to use Rödel’s word, the arcane. Attend closely enough to any object in nature, and it will disclose the secrets of the universe: Rödel’s paintings offer to broker this experience.

Rödel’s paintings defy description or summary. They suggest a multitude of histories, theoretical precepts and modes of perception. But in their elimination of all figurative detail, they remain open. These are only some possibilities of how to read Rödel. If you allow yourself to be immersed in any one of his paintings, they might reveal a whole other chain of associations.

Rebecca Birrell