Literal translation
he sees everything in black
Meaning
he sees everything in a negative light
Explanation
This expression, identical in both languages, describes a pessimistic person, inclined to perceive only the negative sides of a situation, a person, or the future in general. The literal image relies on the contrast of colours: black, in common imagination, is associated with mourning, darkness, the absence of light and therefore of hope, as opposed to the bright colours linked to joy or optimism. To see things in black amounts to filtering reality through a single dark, uniform tint, regardless of the actual colour of things. The phrase works as a metaphor for biased perception, where the gaze cast on the world systematically distorts what it observes in an unfavourable direction. The register is neutral to familiar, usable in any circumstance to describe either a lasting personality trait or a passing mood tied to a recent disappointment. The saying belongs to a very broad symbolic stock, shared by many languages, in which colours encode moods.