265 SEQUENCES

One sheet of black paper, 50 by 65 centimetres, ruled into a grid and filled cell by cell. Each cell holds a complete little scene drawn in bleach — a figure on a chair, a boat, an insect, a table with something on it, a landscape with a moon over it. Two hundred and sixty-five of them, none repeated. The method is the caustic method at its smallest. Sodium hypochlorite lifts the dye out of the paper, so every line arrives pale gold and cannot be taken back. At this scale that is unforgiving: a cell is a few centimetres across, and a stroke that spreads eats its neighbour. Read as a whole it behaves like a page of pictograms rather than a picture — the same instinct that runs through the alphabets, the cryptogram in HYELTW and the folded books. Shown at Espronceda, Barcelona, in November 2020, framed and hung on the white wall with its own label.