Every painting, every text, every partition is a connection.
Ink on paper, opera song, QR codes: each creation is an act of communication, an attempt to connect two people:
A creator, an artist, an author and a spectator, a viewer, a reader.
When 3 primary colours overlap on paper, each representing an audible message, the result is a cacophony of colours, an explosion of shapes.
Even applying the same parameters: QR codes generated by the same app following the same link taxonomy, process printing colours straight out of the pot, the output varies, fragments, overwhelms or disappears. Communication is never neutral and never perfect.
Each colour carries a message, unique and different. The yellow disappears, a barely audible whisper. The magenta, perfectly clear on its own, becomes harder to hear among the noise of the other colours. The cyan shouts and takes over, drowning out the other voices in play.
In his essay, “Death of the author”, Roland Barthes asserts that the author disappears with (and within) the text, and that it is the reader, bringing in their knowledge, experience who decodes and understands.
In other words, the author- the artist- controls the emission of the message, they control the medium but they cannot control the reception, and the meaning of the message.
So any communication can only ever be imperfect:
The sender can only hope for a connection that becomes a communion, or they can hint and speak in demi-mot, or in the words of Arthur Rimbaud they can “reserve the translation”.
The recipient can chose to hear the message or not, they can fill in the silences, they may speak a different language altogether.
Neither “holds the key to this wild parade” (Rimbaud).
Each message becomes a fragment, stretched between what one person says, or doesn’t say, and what another person hears, or whether they chose to listen at all. A pattern that plays out in every act of communication: encoded and decoded with every utterance, every paragraph, every brush stroke.
In this piece, each viewer decides how much they want to see. They can take the print as a simple geometric work, or they can take out their phone, and follow the trail.
The work therefore exists in each connection between myself, the artist, and you, the viewer.
Do you hear me?