Peter Judson’s CMYK monoliths dance around the boundaries of art

“Simplicity can be serious and occasionally seriously silly,” says the illustrator, designer and artist Peter Judson on the webpage for his new series of pixel-art works, Staring At Fields. Inspired by the CMYK colour palette used in print, these audio-visual pieces dance (quite literally) around the boundaries of design and fine art in search of “the moment a collection of elements become one”.

The initial idea for the project came to Peter in the form of a meme: a piece of salmon nigiri sushi ‘rendered’ in RGB vs CMYK – the sushi in RGB looks unnaturally vibrant whereas the CMYK version seems sad and muted. But this dullness inspired Peter, who is fascinated by colour theory. “I think colour is a skill that can be learnt, similar to cooking and combining ingredients. The more you do it the better you become,” he says. “The aim was to combine form and colour until everything clicked into place. Animation became a way of pulling that moment apart – revealing to the viewer that the ‘finished’ composition is fragile,” he continues. “Slight changes in scale and position disrupt the harmony whilst also hinting at how the final composition was made.”

The works aren’t worlds away from teletext, those famously primitive designs on old TVs made up of pixels that blur and bleed between cathode ray tubes. In order to give life to his works, Peter dismantles them – they fall apart, like a child knocking over a tower of blocks, revealing the fundamental motifs inside patterns, stripes, checkers, symmetry and repetition. “You see the pieces not as a fixed composition but as raw elements searching for harmony. Deconstructing and reassembling them allows for catharsis: the artwork is both undone and remade, and your perception shifts with it,” shares Peter.

The sound design came later in the artistic process, as a way of further emphasising this deconstruction. Endearing, MIDI sounds of digital horns, chimes and synths accompany the dancing blocks. Clicking two art works together creates an unexpected collaborative element, as if the jiggling monoliths are talking to each other – musical harmony is achieved alongside visual disharmony. “I’d deliberately undermine the visual by pairing it with something jarring, like heavy horns and bass over a delicate palette,” says Peter. “With 100 works, I had room to test how sound could reinforce or confound how you experience the Image.” This fascinating set of works begins as a test on how we understand visual languages but quickly wins you over, inviting you into its charming, contained chaos.