Dichroic

Lumen & Logic

A hard-edged abstract in which the picture is read through the stack rather than off the top of it. The frame contains exactly two kinds of object — an axis-aligned rectangle and a disc — and neither chooses anything for itself. Every rectangle takes all four of its edges from one lattice of coordinates shared by the whole sheet, built by splitting the frame down recursively so a few very wide bands sit beside slivers a few pixels across, and a share of the coordinates are echoes placed hard against an existing line to make those slivers. Discs ignore the lattice entirely and are the counter-system: drawn from a power law so most are far larger than the frame with their centres off the sheet, they arrive as arcs cutting across the orthogonal grain, and where two of them overlap the double thickness of ink makes a lens, a wedge or a pointed X that is nowhere drawn. No pane picks its colour either: one slow hue field and a second, independent lightness field run across the sheet, and a pane reads both at the point where it happens to sit, so the colour travels smoothly from crimson through magenta and rose to gold and lemon while the value rises and falls on its own schedule. Every pane is laid down translucent, most of them faint and a few near-opaque, so the picture accumulates: the darks are where dark panes stacked four deep and the lights are where pale ones did, and most of the colours in the finished frame — the tans, the apricots, the blue-greys, the plums — are mixtures that no palette entry contains and none can. A share of the panes are stroked instead of filled, at a higher opacity, so keylines run through the dense passages and keep them legible. Large panes are painted first and small ones last, with enough slack in the order that the stack never reads as sorted. Flat, orthogonal, hard-edged — no gradients, no blur, no shadow, no texture, no blend modes, and no shape that is not a rectangle or a circle.

Medium: Generative algorithm, archival pigment print
Dimensions: 90 × 90 cm