Iteration in Motion
As an alternative viewer experience, pure transformation and process without the anchor of recognizable subject matter, our attention focuses entirely on formal qualities - how color relationships shift, how edges blur or sharpen, how patterns emerge or dissolve. Without a familiar subject to reference, i.e., Warhol’s Marilyn and Campbell’s, the changes themselves become the content. It's more meditative, like watching a chemical reaction or observing data visualization in real time.
This creates a sense of temporal depth and material investigation - we’re witnessing the image's own internal logic evolving. The original becomes a seed or starting condition, and the iterations feel like they're revealing hidden structures or testing possibilities within the abstract form itself. Regardless the former, they’re simply fun to watch as they evolve.
From the ‘Selections’ series.
With multiple abstract images the viewing experience becomes formal pattern recognition - tracking how different compositional strategies, color palettes, or gestural qualities create rhythms and relationships. Our attention seeks visual rhymes, contrasts in energy or density, dialogues between different abstract vocabularies. It's more about comparison and aesthetic range.
Departing from Warhol
Warhol's repetitions depend heavily on iconographic recognition - we know Marilyn, we know Campbell's Soup. That familiarity is what makes the variations register as commentary on mass production, celebrity, and mechanical reproduction. The subject carries cultural weight that the repetition either amplifies or drains through overexposure.
With abstract, or non-iconic imagery, we lose that external reference point entirely. The work becomes self-referential and phenomenological - about perception itself, how our eyes and minds process visual information over time. The iterations can't comment on mass culture or fame because there's no "there" there to reproduce. Instead, they explore something more fundamental: how visual form behave, mutate, and reveal themselves through systematic variation. The experience becomes more introspective, less sociological - closer to minimalist or process art than pop art.
From the ‘After’ series.