Repoussé

Lumen & Logic

A tarnished blue-black plate punched from behind, in the metalworker's sense: a smooth relief surface is raised on the reverse and the front shows only the bosses it pushes through. Those bosses are a golden-angle spiral of a few thousand small studs, laid on r = c·n^e at an exponent above the equal-area one so the mat is nearly solid at the core and opens into wide isolated dots at the margins, each stud sized by its own local spacing and nudged off the ideal point by a fraction of it so the Fibonacci arms waver. Every stud is a hard-edged annulus assembled from overlapping discs — a bright crescent on the lit flank, a dark crescent opposite, a pit at the centre held at one constant near-black, and a specular point on the brightest few — and a share of them invert into punched hollows while a few carry the drag scratch of a slipped punch. Nothing else in the picture is lit. The broad bright lobes ringing a sunken dark core are not painted anywhere: they are the diffuse and specular response of the invisible surface, sampled once per stud, with each mark additionally tilted by the local gradient so the field reads as curved rather than as flat and bright. Under it all lies a plate built only from soft blots and hard specks — overlapping cold washes, dark scumbles, and a granular dendritic crust that climbs from the top of the frame, bleaching the plate toward paper and dissolving the studs it reaches. No glow, no bloom, no gradient ramp, no blur and no painted light: the softness is blot overlap and the light is arithmetic.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm