“We do not yet know what a color is.”
M Chirimuuta, Outside Color

In Scott Lyall’s 8th exhibition at the gallery, two recent sequences of work and practical research are assembled as areal colour. Pronounced either ‘aerial’ or ‘a-real’ colour, this coinage is intended to delineate the artist’s use of the analog fields of ink which appear most often in his work as modulated chroma in shifting real-time atmospheres—and at times in stratified picture models. ‘Areal’ invokes the way these colours enter into and return from immaterials, be they math at Nanoscales or AI software. It also points to the painted monochrome and legacies of painting as a field of colour where the surface—as an area—is felt aesthetically. “The quantity of colour is its quality,” (Matisse). Lastly, ‘areal’ shares the syntactical structure of a word like achromatic, where the ‘a’ is a prefix (or an alpha-primitive) that ‘adds’ its negation to the given root. Dialectically, a colour includes non-colour. All pictures of reality are incomplete.

Put more practically, colour is a fourfold structure that combines mathematical, emotional, discursive, and various physical references. But the structure is a function of digitized pixels. These are packets of numerical data that can pass back and forth on an absent threshold to construct a subject on diverging poles. At one of the extremities, the polar charge is exerted by mathematics and immaterials. At the other, an opposing charge is sourced from the bodily effects of living consciousness. One side, silicon; the other, carbon. Here, the subject is effectively a circulation that struggles to connect these poles. In the current exhibition, these connections also weave for the subject a virtual cloak—a 3-D fabric on a 9-D loom. Created outside the space of both a depictive image and the viewing audience, this spectral blanket of connected points is the lode from which the colours for the show are mined, distributed in space, and performed as ink.