"Scientists, scholars and regular people will be able to get beneath the surface of a canvas," Mr. Druick said.
"Stranger still are the colours escaping from these paintings," I wrote at the time, "imaginary colours, greens that come and go, yellows floating in thin air, flying across or shooting out like flames from the surface of a canvas".
The Western painter usually imposed a design on the artificially limited surface of a flat, rectangular canvas; and the sculptor, following predetermined spatial arrangements, imposed a shape on his material.
Specifically, here we plan to scan the surface of historical canvas paintings by means of a triangulation laser sensor mobilized via an XY robot.
In "Uranlicht" ("Uranium Light"), eight white lines extend from the mouth of a bearded gentleman and bound across the checked surface of the canvas next to it, like shooting stars in a beautifully gridded universe.
A behind-the-scenes video, below, shows Xin dabbing acrylic paint onto a light box desk, smearing it to create the painterly watercolor effects, and then etching illustrations onto the surface of the canvas using only fingertips and a pointed brush.
Almost surreal in its displacement, this mundane object (with an overtone of menace), framed by a flat plane like that of a canvas surface, became a leitmotif for Siskind.
In each one, the artist Cristina de Gennaro includes a brass plate with one phrase, while painting a different phrase repeatedly across the surface of the canvas.
He found the unity he had long sought by creating a harmony of colours and tones and by applying a consistent brushstroke across the entire surface of the canvas.
Her early paintings don't so much catch movement as seem to move themselves in glittering dots released like a flight of arrows from the surface of the canvas, in great drifts of finely graded discs that oscillate and shimmer like wind on water, in curving bands of black alternating with different shades of grey that sway at the edges in the corner of your eye like reeds in lapping water.
The three other Fire paintings have smeared white Braille lettering without a figurative image punched into the surface of the canvas.
