Description
The human mind perpetually seeks to create visual order from abstraction. From an early age, we instinctively seek meaning in ambiguous forms, projecting familiarity onto the unfamiliar—much like recognizing shapes in the clouds. This impulse toward visual closure, or the completion of incomplete forms, is both psychological and imaginative, reflecting our need to find coherence in the world around us.
In Sean Noyce’s Cloud Watching series, he reimagines this process through acts of chance. Each work begins with a randomly-generated graphic template, a seed that guides the evolution of form. As he responds to this randomness, recognizable objects emerge, shaped by the conditions and decisions of the moment. The resulting compositions create a tension between order and spontaneity, causing an interplay where disparate forms coexist within a shared visual ecosystem. Their relationships are governed not by narrative intent, but by their adherence to the formal and spatial laws of the world the artist has constructed for them.
Freed from personal narrative, these paintings invite viewers to project their own meanings onto the assemblage of forms. In this way, the work completes a perceptual loop: abstraction gives rise to recognition, and recognition returns to abstraction through the viewer’s imagination.
