The Colour of the Neutral According to R. Barthes (on the Example of H. Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and D. Boudinet’s “Polaroid”)

Interpretations of visual objects by means of Barthesian methodology and conceptual apparatus are striking in the way researchers eventually become preoccupied with his “The Neutral” course. In analysing the problem of colour, colourless, chromatic, and achromatic it is important not to overlook Barthes’s understanding of neutrality and the whole range of concepts and quasi-concepts associated with it.There are numerous practical and applicable studies of grisaille. Georges Didi-Huberman, as well as other researchers, have provided surveys of grisaille with a broad phenomenological and metaphorical scope. However, grisaille is still controversial and unstable in its definition, which allows us to continue the exploration of this phenomenon in a more ambiguous, provocative, and innovative way.Grisaille denotes gradations and manifests itself in different degrees, levels, aspects, genres across a wide variety of cases. This article examines Boudinet’s and Bosch’s artworks as such cases, outlining the key features that allow us to place these objects in the same field of interpretation. The article identifies the similarities between the two works of art. Boudinet’s “photographic writing”, and especially his “Polaroid”, like Bosch’s exterior panels of “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” are nuanced spaces of timelessness, and illegibility. Both work with distancing and the realm of the intimate. It is also determined what role both objects of analysis play in the issue of neutrality and the concept of nuance.The central component of this study is a commentary on the seminar, which is part of “The Neutral” course. By referring to the most recent commentaries and relevant research, we would like to show how the topic of colour invites us to rethink, challenge, renew and restructure our knowledge of neutrality. This applies not only to Barthes’s ideas but also, considering the context, to the material and allegorical shades of grey that tint our everyday lives.