RGBStudies

Nicolas Sassoon’s RGB Studies is an ongoing project initiated 15 years ago and divided into multiple series, ranging from figurative landscapes to textural abstractions. Each series within RGB Studies employs a unique moiré patterning technique—central across Sassoon’s practice—in which two images overlap to create the illusion of a third image. In RGB Studies, the moiré technique is used to generate digital animations rendered exclusively with the 3 primary colors—red, green, blue—and hard-edged pixel patterns. This rendering method emulates an optical illusion embedded in the structure of contemporary screens, where each pixel is physically composed of 3 primary-colored diodes. The distance between the screen and the human eye generates the illusion of “seeing” in millions of colors, and thus structures the visual experience of screen-based graphics. RGB Studies considers this optical strategy—one which can be traced back to many artistic traditions from tapestry to painting—as a foundation of the project.

Sassoon’s project is also in dialogue with George Seurat’s pointillist paintings, in which thousands of multicolored dots form a cohesive and vibrant figurative image. RGB Studies employs a similar method in its use of individual pixels of color, as a medium specific approach responding to the context of screen-based graphics and matrix display technology. Each work in the series is initially drawn on screen as an image in shades of grey, akin to an analog sketch. The image is then converted to a black and white halftoned bitmap, which is then distorted, duplicated, and overlaid on top of moving red, green, and blue pixel lines. This multi- step process converts a flat and static composition into an animated and highly textural digital moiré. Through an attentiveness to the optical mechanics of the screen, Sassoon transforms visual information into animations that show ever-changing levels of brightness, pixel density, and color. Individual pixels become cellular units of light weaving dynamic representations through optical and kinetic effects.

LANDSCAPES

The first series from RGB Studies consists of 90 animations featuring archetypal landscape imagery. This series reflects on Sassoon’s longstanding interest in landscapes: as a visual construct, a space for projection, and a ground for memories and imagination. Mountains, valleys, forests, rivers, and coastlines appear in a haze, drawing ethereal topographies of imaginary places through color and light. The works are composed using atmospheric perspective—an ancient artistic technique found across Greco-Roman frescos, early Chinese landscapes and Italian Renaissance paintings—to signify depth. Scenes gradually disappear in the distance using brightness, contrast, and saturation. The series reimagines this traditional mode of representation using processes specific to computer imaging and screen-based graphics: visual information becomes reinterpreted as pixelated textures, kinetic motions, and prismatic colors to represent landscape and atmosphere. The resulting works are ambivalent, recollecting both old and new, idyllic and dystopic, abstract and figurative, digital and material.