Setout by Lumen & Logic

Setout

Lumen & Logic

See it in the room

A finished sheet with its own setting-out left on the paper. A few large landscape plates step down the sheet in a zig-zag, alternating either side of centre and each tipped a degree or two off square, and each is flooded with one flat colour off a ladder read top to bottom — so the cascade descends through the palette as it descends the page. A plate is inked by being painted twice: a graphite copy of the same rectangle offset a little, then the colour on top, so the heavy black band lands on exactly two of the four edges and no stroke, mitre or corner join exists anywhere in it. Every other mark on the sheet is derived from the plates rather than scattered among them: a rule is the line through two of their own corners, midpoints or centres, or a line parallel to one of their edges at an exact whole number of modules; an arc is struck from one of those points with its radius measured to another, so every arc in the picture passes through a feature of the composition; a bore sits on the crossing of two rules already drawn and is cross-haired along them. Part of the field is drawn before the plates and buried under the paint and the rest across it, which is what makes the sheet read as layered drafting rather than as a print. Inside every plate, and inside the paper-flooded detail assemblies that occlude the field in the margins — the same painter, a different flood — a local grid at the sheet’s one module is packed with sub-rectangles wearing one of seven dressings: open, solid, knocked out to paper, ruled at the fine pitch, reduced to a bracket, bored with a centre dot, or cut on its diagonal. Because the module is a constant of the sheet rather than a fraction of each plate, a large plate carries more marks than a small one at identical size and every count in the picture is an output rather than a setting. Four inks, one pen weight, no gradient inside any shape, and no transparency anywhere but the paper’s own tooth.

Medium
Generative algorithm, archival pigment print
Dimensions
64 × 90 cm