Sudoku studies series, 9 x 9 black to white, III
Geoff and Eilidh Lucas
Sudoku studies series, 9 x 9 black to white, III,
2020
Oil on canvas
40 x 40cm
The piece is from a series of works using Sudoku patterns. The ‘self-organisation’ of areas of paint on the canvas, following the Sudoku rules, might provide a simple analogy for thinking about other possible processes of self-organisation; from perhaps the very local, in how people negotiate with each other in any particular space, to the global, in considering the world as a self-organising system.
These works could then be a moment to consider how we relate to both our immediate and our wider environment.
We included this piece and two other works from this series in our recent solo show at Concept Space in Japan (www.conceptspace.jp), a space exhibiting international and Japanese artists mostly working in areas related to Minimal and Conceptual art, which has been curated for over 35 years by the artist Atsuo Hukuda.
Concept Space is part of a traditional Japanese building with tatami mat flooring. So the paintings particularly played off the spatial divisions of their surroundings.
Other works in the show had been made with the help of the Institute of Physics, Scotland. In the largest of these works we asked thirty of their members to mark ‘x’s on A4 pieces of paper, which we then presented, arranged as a grid. That it was a number of physicists that had made these ‘x’s aligned thoughts on the moment of concretization, in putting pen to paper, with the collapse of the wave-function of atoms — the moment of observation, when atoms move from existing within an area of possibility (which could be considered as the blank A4 paper) to occupying an exact location — or here, the ‘x’.
These works again might prompt thoughts for the viewer, of how they act in relation to the space of the gallery. Or beyond this, how their particular choices and decisions form their part, at one scale, of a general self-organising process.
