Purlin by Lumen & Logic

Purlin

Lumen & Logic

See it in the room

Flat cut colour, and one operation behind all of it. A sheet is carved by long straight cuts into convex faces, and because a face of a line arrangement is convex, its mitred inward offset is nothing more than its own edge half-planes pushed in and re-intersected — so every face can be eroded, exactly and in closed form, into a nest of outlines parallel to its own boundary, turning every corner with a sharp mitre. The step is one global constant rather than a fraction of each cell, which is what makes the sheet read as a single material: a big face carries twenty bands and a small one carries three, at identical width, and band count is an output rather than a setting. Where the offsets run out, the nest closes on the face’s straight skeleton — a point in a triangle, a short ridge in anything wider — so the cells fold like low roofs seen from above instead of tunnelling toward a vanishing point. Each band is then cut once more by the same primitive, into the skeleton facet belonging to each side, and each facet is tipped a shade toward the light or away from it by the direction of the side that made it, so the mitre creases show as tonal breaks and the relief costs the picture no gradient, no shadow and no transparency. Colour steps through one cycle built by sorting the palette around the hue wheel, one entry per band, with each face starting at its own phase and the occasional band coming up pale, so neighbouring nests never line up while the whole sheet keeps one colour system. Thin seams run along every band boundary and heavier ones along every cut, and a separate, looser set of long chords is drawn over the finished nests without the nests taking any notice of them, beaded along their length. Finally the whole drawing is passed through one bounded, coherent displacement of the plane, so cuts bow, nests bow with them, and cells that share a cut bow together — a hand, not a jitter, and one that cannot make two bands cross because it is a homeomorphism.

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