Transom

Lumen & Logic

A hard-edged flat-colour composition in fluorescent ink, drawn once and then printed again in each pane of a window in a different key. Every edge in the picture is horizontal, vertical or at exactly 45°, and none of them is chosen freely: the axis-aligned ones lie on one irregular lattice built by splitting the sheet down recursively, so broad fields sit beside slivers, and the diagonals lie on a dozen datum lines shared by the whole sheet, which is why the cut corner of one slab and the long band crossing another are on the same line. Plates are convex, opaque and painted back to front, so every stepped and notched silhouette in the picture is two plates overlapping rather than a shape anyone drew; a share of them are striped into stacks of bands on the same lattice, and a share carry a mitred bevel — a strip one tone lighter along the edges facing the light and one tone darker along the rest, cut as the set of points nearer to one edge than to any other, so the miters are exact and nothing is offset, outlined or shadowed. Colour is not painted but named: one closed hue circle and one five-rung tone ladder, so a mark carries a pair of integers and no picture can contain more than five colours per palette entry, the pale tints and the near-blacks being rungs of the same hues as the saturated fields. The sheet is then cut into panes by seams that run edge to edge, and each pane repaints the entire composition with the hue circle rotated by its own amount — a shape crosses a seam with every vertex unchanged and only its colours different, and because relief is carried by the tone axis rather than the hue one, the same slab reads as the same lifted slab in every key. Full bleed, no ground, no outline, no gradient, no transparency.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm