chronoPrints
2009
Manuel Abendroth, Jerome Decock, Els Vermang
Size: 60 * 60 cm and 110 * 110 cm
Technique: pigmentprint on D-bond
The artwork is based on an analytic system assigning the basic units of time – hours, minutes and seconds - to the primary colours of light - red, green and blue. This association leads to a process of colour surfaces filling the space over time. This results in overlapping colour surfaces, areas where the secondary colours yellow, cyan and magenta appear.
A chronoPrint is a plot of one hour of a day, starting with its first second at the left upper corner, until the last; 3600th one, at the right bottom corner. Each horizontal line of a print displays the 60 seconds of a minute while the entire 60 lines display the 60 minutes of an hour. Each of the 3600 separated squares is itself divided into solid delineated colour surfaces. The process is based on the ‘American’ 12-hour system dividing a day into two periods (a.m. / p.m.).
This logic finds its expression in the application of a process which involves adding colour between noon and midnight and subtracting colour from midnight to noon. Con- sequently a complete white colour space appears at midnight, when all hours, minutes and seconds have completed, and a complete black colour space appears at noon, when all colours are reduced to zero. This division into two parts is formalised by a white and black background. Accordingly the prints portray a fundamental theme of painting: the relation between colour and time reduced to their most elementary expression.
From this parametric relation emerges colour patterns best described as chromatic textures of time.
The process originally has been conceived as a light artwork, and has been exhibited as such on Brussels Rogier Tower in 2007.
chronoLoci
2015
Size: 60 * 80 cm
Technique: computer generated prints, 310 gsm paper
The chronoLoci project extends the principle used in the chronoPrints, assigning colour to time, to the relative length of a day. Here contextual parameters (specific date from sunset to sunrise) and space (location on earth) transform the finite system of the chronoPrints, where all possible variations are included in the 24 impressions, to an infinite system. The colour pattern expresses, through its subdivisions, the relative time set. A first series of 4 prints presents the four seasons relative to Brussels and the year of its conception in 2015. These first date paintings explore the relation between colour and time, both by its constituting as its contextual parameters.
