Battery 2002

James Siena made this print, called Battery, by using a set of rules to create a mesmerizing field of red and white. It looks to me like a kind of map, or a virus, or maybe even a memory. The texture in this piece comes from the obsessive repetition of these oval shapes, each one slightly different, like cells dividing or maybe crowds assembling. The red ink, it’s almost visceral. I keep looking at these shapes, and they seem to vibrate, almost pulsing, as if the page itself is breathing. There is one cell that is slightly brighter than the others, to the left of the image centre. I think of that as a key, an entry point that unlocks the whole structure. This feels like a close relative to the work of Sol Lewitt, and other artists interested in the seriality of systems and structures, but with a twist. Siena makes rules, but they are imperfect, and his hand, his sensibility is always visible in the wobble of the lines.