Intarsia

Lumen & Logic

A frontal bust cut from coloured stock and stacked into relief, in the woodworker's sense: every object in the frame is one primitive — a plate with a shrinkable silhouette, cut once and then re-cut inward as a run of concentric copies of itself, each copy a step further up the stack and a step along a hue-sorted pool of pastel stock, with dark seam plates alternating into the run wherever it is long. The only depth cue in the picture is a hard kerf sliver: each plate and each band fills its own silhouette once in near-black, offset a few thousandths of the frame down-light, before filling it in colour — so the stack reads as lit stock without one gradient, one outline, one bevel or one shaded face anywhere. The same primitive builds all of it. A procedural head shell is tiled by a couple of dozen rounded organic plates that ignore the anatomy and run across brow, cheek and jaw; the nose, lips, nostrils and ears are small stacks; the neck runs into shoulders dressed in long collar bands that follow the shoulder line off both edges; two very large concentric-ring lenses — a bullseye, a lobed rosette or one wide banded visor, by seed — stand where the eyes should be and overrun the brow; and a crown of a hundred-odd tapering blades is combed out of the skull through a curl-noise flow field, shingled consistently so the mass reads as one flow, split per blade into a pass behind the head and a pass over the forehead so the hair is stitched to the figure rather than pasted behind it. The ground is one flat colour used nowhere else in the picture, carrying nothing but a faint even grain. No gradient, no outline, no glow, no blur, no perspective and no light model: the light exists only as the direction every kerf falls, and flattening it to zero leaves a flat marquetry panel.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm