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31  |   C
Ninety-nine drawings, airbrushed and stamped, 1999
Acrylic on paper, each 45 x 62.7 cm
In a lacquered wooden storage case, 48.5 x 66.5 x 8.8 cm.

The work C (C as the Roman numeral standing for centum, “one hundred,” or, homophonically speaking, as the verb to see) comprises ninety-nine “works-on-paper”—for want of better terminology—measuring 45 x 62.7 centimeters apiece. Each displays a number from one to ninety-nine, represented as a combination of different-colored rectangles, with each number also appearing as an Arabic numeral, in titling figures, stamped in light grey acrylic paint at the bottom of the appropriate sheet of paper. They are collected in a black, satin-finished wooden case, whose top lifts off and each of whose four hinged sides can be lowered to remove, or replace, individual sheets.

C’s schema, drawn and stamped in acrylic on black illustration board, mounted on the inside of  the work’s wooden storage case.

The basic rules according to which the numbers have been formed—adapted from the method Karl von Frisch developed to number the bees in his experiments and schematically recorded on the inside of C’s lid—use rectangles in five different colors in four different positions. They are the same as those I used in KEEPER:

An ideated rectangle—measuring 22 x 42 centimeters, the size of a honeycomb-frame of the Zander variety—is divided horizontally and vertically into four smaller rectangles of equal size (11 x 21 centimeters). Each of these smaller rectangles can occur in five different colors: white stands for the digits 1 and 6; red for 2 and 7; blue for 3 and 5; yellow for 4 and 9; green for 5 and 0. If a rectangular “digit” is situated on the right-hand side it is considered to be in “ones” position, that is, one reads the five colors in the upper right position as the numbers 1 through 5, and in the lower right position as 6 through 9 and the digit 0; when located in the left-hand fields, they are considered to be in the “tens” position, thus read as 10 through 50 above and as 60 through 90 below.

In the wall-sculpture KEEPER, I used five different natural wood stains whose shades are reminiscent of various sorts of honey, whereas in C, I employed concentrated acrylic spray pigments in the original bright colors chosen by Karl von Frisch. Each sharply contoured rectangle has been airbrushed onto the paper’s smooth, sized surface, so that what are actually original graphics resemble silkscreen prints.