Rondel

Lumen & Logic

A flat screenprint of three straight rulings and one circle that is never drawn. Two of the rulings belong to the sheet — one vertical, one horizontal, both defined across the whole plate rather than per cell — and a grid of square windows admits one or the other by the parity of its row and column, so a bar leaving one cell lines up with the bar entering the next because it is the same bar. The third ruling, coarser and oblique, belongs to the circle and exists nowhere else. The picture is printed twice in perfect register: once plain, and once again clipped to the circle with every field colour mixed one step toward a single colour of glass and every bar colour left exactly as it was — so the boundary is a line along which several hundred bars change the colour behind them while the bars themselves do not change at all, which is why the circle reads as a pane behind the print rather than a wash over it, though nothing in the package is transparent and no alpha is ever set. One paint order governs the whole sheet — vertical, then oblique, then horizontal — and it is what makes the oblique bands cross the vertical cells unbroken and appear in the horizontal ones as a field of short dashes cut at exactly the horizontal pitch: nothing is drawn as a dash, and the two readings are one order seen in two kinds of cell. Colour is dealt by the orbit of the grid's own half-turn, so cells at either end of a line through the centre are identical, and the rulings are anchored so that the whole picture is exactly invariant under that half-turn: a band set is symmetric about the centre only when twice its phase plus its duty is a whole number, so the phase is not free and the seed may only choose, per ruling, whether a band or a gap straddles the centre line. A bar is filled four ways — solid, twinned into a pair of hairlines at its edges, cut by a second rhythm that depends only on distance along the bar so the cuts line up across every bar and a cross-ruling appears that nothing draws, or breathing on a slow beat six bands wide — and the lens is a disc, a ring, a lozenge or a quatrefoil, all of them centrally symmetric so the half-turn survives the choice. Fills only: no stroke, no outline, no gradient, no transparency, no blend mode, no shadow, no texture, and no border around any cell.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm