Argus

Lumen & Logic

A knotted mass of paint on woven linen: broad magenta ribbons looping around two centres, flat cobalt plates with hard faceted silhouettes ruled inside with fine parallel lines, white combing lying square across the ribbons, and stylised eyes hidden in the tangle. There is one construction behind all of it — the pencil of circles through two points, together with its orthogonal family of Apollonius circles — and every mark is an arc of one of a handful of such pencils or the region between two of them, so nothing on the sheet is a Bézier, an offset polygon or a sampled curve; a thumbnail and a full-size export are the same circles. Because the map ζ = log((z−A)/(z−B)) is conformal, the two families cross at right angles everywhere, so hatching stands square to the band it rules and lashes stand square to the lid they leave, and no normal is computed anywhere in the algorithm. Because its scale factor is a/(cosh ξ − cos η), a band of constant width in the chart tapers on the sheet by coth²(ξ/2) between its belly and its tail — so one number takes a stroke from an even ribbon to a whip that starves to a point, no width profile is ever written, and every stroke is thinnest where it crosses between the two whorls, which is what gives the mass its waist. The same factor spaces the ruling, so hatching tightens exactly where a stroke narrows. Ribbons are translucent and multiply where they cross, so the deepest plums in the picture are crossings rather than palette entries, while the plates are opaque and read as cut paper on top. An eye is not drawn as an eye but built as a pencil the size of a thumbnail: its lids are two arcs cusped at the corners, its lashes are members of the orthogonal family, and its gaze rides the axis between them. The linen is a real plain weave — two dashed families a half-pitch out of phase, so exactly one thread is drawn at every crossing — laid over the paint rather than under it, and the light in the sheet is the bands themselves dilated and painted pale.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

64 × 90 cm