My paintings are diagrammatic color games, a study of evolving systems at the intersection of order and cacophony. I draw from geometries of the color wheel, infusing color with the poetics of math as a language for understanding reality. Numbers, both random and algorithmic, are the infrastructure of each painting. Ongoing stratified number sequences, randomization processes, prime number sieves, and logical geometries all tie numbers to colors. These systems are consistent by nature, but their visual outcomes are unexpected.
Color is defined by change and unpredictability. Each instance of color is radically shifted by its surroundings. Physiological adjustment changes the experience of color through time. Color theory mechanics generate vibrating fields of simultaneous contrast. The eye fuses particulate colors at a distance to form the impression of new colors. With the ongoing development of pigments, optical and physical mixtures evolve through time, so the foundation of color theory itself is always shifting and changing.
Nevertheless, a fixed linguistic aspect of color persists. Ubiquitous colors (red, yellow, green, blue) don’t have to be physically experienced to be cognitively summoned. When these identities are buttressed by pattern, a painting becomes a predictive system, a map. Patterns filtered through disintegrating algorithms are like utterances with missing information, requiring predictive maps to synthesize noise into meaning. Colors behave like packets of sound, as systems create the legible image. When missing information collapses pattern into glitch, the visual field oscillates between recognition and chaos.
Geometry has long been employed to facilitate spiritual experiences. It augments visions of deeper meaning in reality, while subverting damaging iconographies that enable violent hierarchy and false division. It fuses the mathematical wonder of cosmology, time, particle behavior, with the intimate and psychological. Suspending judgment, while playing with the forms of math and logic, observing color’s instability and the limits of language, is alchemical and transformative.