The Color Code You Can’t Scroll Past

In the gallery at SCOPE BLN, a ten-metre canvas stands in the centre of the space, rising the full height of the room. It doesn’t behave like a painting. It behaves like a presence; leaning, twisting, folding itself around the air. You don’t look at it. You watch it, like you watch a screen, or a fire, or the city at night from a tram window. Something that keeps moving even when it appears to pause.

Living Atlas: Berlin Score (2025), acrylic paint on canvas, 1000 × 165 cm.

This so-called “non-figurative” canvas carries a nomadic sense of place. It’s connected to current global realities: the displacement of people, the collapse of ecologies, and the growing need to re-learn how to read landscapes as living systems. These transformations are transmitted, accelerated, and distorted by the same technologies that structure our everyday habits; scrolling, swiping, zooming, scanning. The canvas registers this tension: the analogue body of painting in dialogue with the coded bodies of digital life.

But that is not its secret.

Watch how color moves through it. We often refer to the prism because it reveals that colors are born not in light but from light; and light is the first condition for life. So we treat colors as emissaries of life. Painting with them is imagining them at the moment before they become language, when nothing has a fixed name yet and everything is on the verge of appearing.

At such a threshold, colors behave like signals for what is about to begin; almost like a biological code. When you look at our reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, purples, they feel less like pigments and more like our DNA. Also the shapes they inhabit; squares, horizontals, verticals, diagonals, are the basic building blocks of everything around us: architecture, interfaces, signage, maps, the city.

Inevitably, viewers ask:

“What is this code about?”

We respond with another question:

Do you ever ask what the codes you look at all day are about?

The notifications, the maps that guide you, the color-coded alerts, the interfaces you navigate without thinking, these codes structure your presence in public space. You trust them, rely on them, ignore them, obey them.

We materialised one code, placed it in the middle of the white cube, and it becomes questionable. Because our code — or rather, our algorithm — has authors, someone is accountable. Unlike the codes you follow every day without knowing who wrote them.

So the question isn’t what our code means.

It’s what your codes mean;

the ones you follow every day without noticing you’re inside them.