Otto Piene, Red Eye Red (1977), with three colour studies

What it is, and who made it

The post has two layers of authorship:

• Otto Piene, Red Eye Red, 1977, serigraph. These details come from the post caption. Piene (1928 to 2014) co-founded the ZERO group, and he made light ballets as well as smoke and fire paintings. Those biographical facts are from memory, high confidence.
• Three colour studies by Meditations in Color, credited "by Pixel Symphony". Each study takes the print's palette through a historical colour system:
  • Josef Albers, Homage to the Square;
  • Wada Sanzō, A Dictionary of Color Combinations;
  • the Heian court's kasane no irome, colours of layered robes.

Parts, layer by layer

The print (image 1)

Study 1: one centre on four grounds, after Albers (image 2)

• Structure: four plates of four nested squares. The inner squares sit low, as in Albers (O).
• One centre: #d84830 (M, named region "the centre, on the page"). The same hex appears at 0.162 of each plate's palette, measured in all four crops. The page does what its caption says: it shows one colour four times.
• Grounds (M):

Concentricity is highest on the darker ground (1.323), where the nested fields separate most.

• Principle: simultaneous contrast. One chip reads differently on each ground (Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963).

Study 2: twos, threes and fours, after Wada (image 3)

• Twelve colours, measured from the printed swatches (M):

The page prints its own hex codes under the swatches, but they are too small to read in this save (O). Our values carry JPEG error, so expect differences of a few units.

• Combinations: 4 pairs, 4 triples and 4 quadruples (O). Each tile is labelled with its colour indices, such as "6·3", "1·10·8" or "4·6·2·8", and laid out as unequal bands and quarters.
• Principle: a fixed, indexed palette. Harmony is a small set of indices, chosen and named.

Study 3: robes in layers, after kasane no irome (image 4)

• Four robes, palettes measured (M):

• Structure: a V collar shows 4 to 5 stacked colour bands, and the hem repeats them. A key of 4 to 5 small squares sits under each name, in layer order (O).
• Principle: colour as a stack seen only at its edges, named for a season.

The study pages as a design system

• A light orange serif for the artist and a darker serif for the work.
• Small italic captions and tracked small capitals in grey (O).
• One footer credit.

The framework behind it

One palette, three operators. The post is a decomposition engine made by hand:

• The source artwork supplies a palette, here 12 colours.
• Each historical colour system acts as an operator on that palette, and each tests a different claim:
  • Relational (Albers): a colour's appearance depends on its neighbour, so hold one colour and vary its ground.
  • Combinatorial (Wada): harmony lives in small indexed sets, so enumerate pairs, triples and quadruples.
  • Layered (kasane): colour is a stack seen at its edges, and the stack is named for a time of year.

The outputs are plates, not paintings. Each makes one claim checkable. That matches the canon's method: break a reference into parts, then recombine.

The same idea in distant fields

• Music: a scale (the palette) run through harmonic systems. The same twelve tones serve as chords (Wada), as voicings over a pedal (Albers, one note against changing bass) and as layered instrumentation (kasane).
• Chemistry: one compound's spectrum under different solvents. The solvent shifts what the "same" colour looks like, as the ground does in Albers.
• Typography: one glyph set at many sizes and on many grounds in a specimen sheet. Our feed sets ask for this repeatedly (GAPS item 24, the specimen sheet).
• Data visualisation: colour-blind and contrast audits put one palette through several perceptual models, and each plate is a test.
• Textile and lacquer: kasane is a cousin of laminated glass and of lacquer built up in coats. The colour is the sum of the layers, and the edge is where the sum shows. That links to our glass and intaglio work, where the cut edge reveals the layers.

Dual edge

• Reused palettes fake provenance. Extracting a master's palette and running it through prestige systems lends authority to anything painted in it. The plates must say whose palette, extracted how. Our records do; a published plate set must too.
• Simultaneous contrast is a persuasion tool. The same effect that teaches Albers can make a chart's bar look larger or a warning look milder.
• Seasonal naming is a cultural system. Kasane names carry court meaning. Using them as decoration without that context is a thin borrowing. The study pages credit the source; our plates should cite it too.

Measured

Concepts

• aperture eye
• archive memory
• calm contemplation
• chance order
• checking as craft
• code
• contrast
• cycle season
• data
• decomposition measure
• diffusion
• dispersion
• engraving carving
• error as texture
• field
• fire heat
• glass
• glyph cell
• grain texture
• grid
• halftone dither
• horizon
• identity name
• ink
• law weber fechner
• layering
• light
• loop cycle
• mosaic
• negative space
• network graph
• paper
• path stroke
• pigment
• plant
• reading order
• repetition rhythm visual
• resonance pitch
• ribbon
• ring orbit
• rule andamento follows form
• rule burin tone by line
• rule readability is king
• rule recombine not copy
• saturation hue
• scale crop
• sedimentation
• sound
• specimen plate
• symmetry
• tessellation
• thread textile
• time as material
• turbulence
• type

All studies