Quoin

Lumen & Logic

One square module rules the whole sheet. A single uniform lattice is packed, largest blocks first, into flat rectangles of one, two, three or four modules a side — claimed exclusively rather than subdivided, so a block may be a domino or a three-wide bar and may start at any lattice coordinate rather than only at a power-of-two one, and whatever the packing does not claim stays a single module. Blocks butt flush with no gutter, no keyline and no ground showing through: the sheet is a partition, full bleed on all four edges. Every block is printed in exactly two inks drawn as a pair from a ladder built out of the palette, with the pair held coherent across neighbours by a smooth field and the polarity flipped per block, so passages of one pairing sit against passages of another, both light-on-dark and dark-on-light are everywhere, and wherever adjacent blocks happen to agree on a ground their fields fuse into masses several blocks across — the only composition in the picture, and an emergent one. Each block then takes at most one hard-edged mark in its second ink: a corner quarter disc, an edge half disc, an inscribed circle, a circle inside a circle, a quarter-annulus band, a run of parallel bars, a field of dots or a diagonal wedge. What ties the marks together is that they are measured and phased in the module rather than in the block — bar pitch and dot pitch are constants of the sheet, so a four-module block carries four times the bars of a one-module block at identical width, mark counts are outputs rather than settings, and bars in unrelated neighbouring blocks land on the same rulings and run across the joint. Nothing is outlined, nothing is transparent, nothing has a gradient and no layer is drawn over the partition.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm