A quick answer will set the black and white image to be an opposite of color. However, that still doesn't free the ground for the pure action of shapes. The scale of gray tones hides a surprising kinship with the color spectrum.

A lot of these similarities are quite subtle, so we can hardly notice much of contraction and expansion, or especially appearance of intro- or extroversion; even the impressions of cold and warm are more contextual here. However, the emotional effects of tones still depend on minute shade changes - sometimes a slightly darker photograph feels entirely different. It wouldn't be possible to go through all these tones our eye (and heart) differentiates, not only because of their number, but also because here, unlike with color spectrum where we can refer to particular color and be universally recognized, we don't even have some conventions to use as firm rungs of the ladder. For that reason, let's try just an overall description. Low tones appears to be inwardly closed, shaded and fit for mystification. There is a feeling of an exhale, warmth, and greater weight in the saturation with black. This ends in black, which hides its content, forcing us to imagine the worlds beneath its unpenetrable solid, all in a vivid and clear impression of passive viewer, so characteristic for perception of colors. Black feels like a silence after the music; white responds to a pause within it (Kandinsky).

In contrast, white is an extreme explicitness, like daylight, so high tones have the impression of an inhale, light materiality with a certain fragility, accessibility, and, conditionally, coldness. As far as the movement towards and away from the eye, there are contradictions: ambivalence is available for use - again depending on the context. The idea of light's nature inspires the feeling of highlights approaching, shadows departing. This is in contradiction with aerial perspective, where haze makes distance light, or with some other aspects of perceiving tones (such as the tactility of dark and transcendence of light). Distinction between our subject and the background will help set the direction in many practical cases (letters standing on a top of a white paper), even though the dark image often seems "inset" into the white wall. The old cinematic rule that a light background contributes to the feeling of depth has different grounds: it is because the background is coming forth that we notice the spatial arrangement to begin with. Yin - Yang theory also fights against: it understands dark to be active - we can only explain it as an illustration of its specific thought. There is definitely a contradictory thinking going here at some wholesale prices. However, this is not the same dialectic the other mentioned elements of composition carry within: these are simply impressions subtle enough to succumb to a variety of outside influences and interpretations. Knowing those outside factors will help us clean up and get to the meaning of tones themselves.

Precise tonality is important because it determines the character of the whole surface. It was necessary to be very cautious with just how dark tones may be allowed on this wall, to preserve the feeling of sharp and brittle delicacy (somewhat in the contradiction with the wall material itself).