Riffle

Lumen & Logic

A frame filled edge to edge with one stack of laminae seen on its cut edge — several hundred parallel strands of colour sweeping across the sheet in long coherent curves, packed to hairlines in places and opening into wide slabs in others, like the bowed edge of a block of coloured paper riffled past a thumb. There is no background: every pixel belongs to a lamina, so nothing can be sparse and nothing can glow. Nothing in the picture is placed. The whole stack is one monotone remap of a single across-stack coordinate, built from a handful of harmonics whose phases travel along the frame at different rates, and a lamina’s width on screen is that map’s derivative — so a band is a slab where the map dilates and a hairline where it compresses, the same band changes width several times over along its own length, and every dense, dark passage and every open, bright one is a crowding effect rather than a painted shape. Because the map is monotone, no two strands can ever cross, merge or end. Thickness comes from a repeating block of laminae drawn from a power law so a few slabs sit among many hairlines, and a share of the blocks are mirrored, so the colour ramp folds back on itself and runs meet either at their pale ends or at their dark ones the way a folded stack does. Colour is one narrow family carried on value: a ramp walked in order down each block, with the palette’s own dark desaturated and lifted for the cool-reading hairlines and a near-white for the occasional bright edge, and only ever assigned to thin laminae. Lighting is geometry twice over: each lamina is filled with a cross-band gradient so it reads as a rounded ridge — which is also the only reason a boundary between two laminae is visible, since nothing in the package is ever stroked or outlined — and a slow anisotropic sheen tracks the angle between the local strand direction and one light, so the sheet darkens where it turns and lights where it runs flat. Opaque fills only: no stroke, no outline, no background, no blend mode, no blur, no shadow, no noise field and no per-pixel work anywhere.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm