Tetrachromacy

Some Not-So-Random Notes on Randomness in My Art

By Luc Sokolowski 

On the occasion of the reception for his solo exhibition, Tetrachromacy

Lone Star College North Harris Library Gallery

Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 11am

1

It may seem that this exhibition is obviously about color. All of the paintings in the show have only four colors in different combinations and compositions. That’s why the earlier works have titles with four letters in parentheses, which refer to the colors in those paintings. That’s also why the show is called Tetrachromacy, which refers to the ability of some animals to see four dimensions or wavelengths of color, rather than just the three that humans generally can see. But this show also tells the story of how I gradually incorporated randomness into my art. I didn’t wake up one morning with the thought, I want to make generative images, I want to use randomness in my paintings. Rather, I turned to randomness when I realized that I had invented parameters in which any decision would work, any choice would make an interesting image, at least to me. So instead of deliberating over every detail of each painting, I left them up to chance, fate, destiny, or whatever you want to call it, by using an online random number generator. For reference, most of the paintings on the wall across from the gallery entrance were made using randomness, as well as all of the small 6x6 inch framed works on the other walls.

2

Sometimes the colors in my paintings are arranged in a random way, and sometimes the compositions are also randomized. I don’t randomize the color palettes, however, at least not yet. This is because in some ways color seems to me too complicated and wild. There are so many possibilities and only a few of those options generate the optical illusions of transparency, light, and shadow that I like. I like these effects because they are the glue that integrates all of the random color arrangements and shapes that happen in my work. 

3

So I like to talk in terms of ‘layers’ of randomness in my paintings. One layer could be how the colors have been arranged. Another layer could be how the composition has been generated by randomness. Actually, the composition could have multiple layers of randomness. I could use a random number generator to decide whether a square is bisected or not, and if it is bisected, then I could again use the generator to pick how it is bisected, whether diagonally up or diagonally down. I feel these layers combine to make my work look more cartographic. My paintings are ways of visualizing randomness, of mapping chance. Randomized lines and colors overlaid on top of a grid may give some sense of the geography of chaos. 

4

More than that, my use of randomness has given my art another dimension, a kind of energy that takes it beyond my mere intentions and bestows upon it a life of its own. I think that introducing chance into my work gives it a kind of spontaneity and expressiveness, even though the paintings are geometric and carefully made. The element of chance produces an almost gestural quality in my geometric paintings. Here the eye can travel through labyrinthine channels of optical illusions of transparency, light, and shadow much like it follows palimpsestic marks in abstract expressionist paintings. And because I have no control over much of the resulting composition, it isn’t me who is expressing something, but what is doing it? The universe? An invisible entity? Is there actually an intelligence trying to communicate a message, or are we just reading feelings and meaning into the image?

5

The picture does not always look logical, and that may be what gives it an intuitive and emotive character. Either way, randomness takes risks in my paintings that I never would have dreamed of taking myself, and it works every time. There is always a precarious necessity to chance, a disorderly order that is hard to imitate on my own. Or maybe, again, I’m just projecting order onto disorder, and ignoring the parts I don’t like. But randomness isn’t just disorder. After working with randomness in my art for the last year, for me it has simply come to mean unpredictability and uncertainty, which is inherently subjective, if not also objective. With a random number generator, a perfectly ordered pattern is just as possible as the most disordered arrangement, though maybe not as probable. The greater the possibilities, the greater the unpredictability, and therefore the greater the feeling of uncertainty. But randomness can generate at least the appearance of order as well as disorder, it seems to me. 

6

Because both order and disorder are possible with randomness, pure chance is just noise that is very difficult to draw meaning from or to project meaning onto its form. And pure predictability can be both overpowering in its unavoidable logic, and tedious in its monotonous patterns. But chance merged with or emerging from predictability, is very interesting to me. Together unpredictability and predictability complement and enhance each other. The particularities of one become more apparent in the context of the other.

7

In my paintings, I provide the order, the predictability, by designing algorithms that incorporate chance. I would say that the design gives a framework for randomness to play in the color and composition. These systems that I have devised allow any permutation as acceptable. The algorithms make randomness palatable with the help of certain color combinations, as I mentioned before. Through these procedures, forms of various dimensions appear out of the static of randomly generated odd and even numbers which determine whether a line goes up or down and whether a color is dark or light. Since randomness is an essential component to my work, I am beginning to think of chance as a medium in itself, like paint or clay. 

8

I see these randomized paintings as complementary to generative AI, which is based on predictive algorithms. The point of my latest paintings is to generate unpredictable images. By incorporating randomness in my artistic process, I open my work to strangeness and coincidence. In other words, I introduce chance in my art because I want my art to surprise me. Also, lingering in the back of my mind is the thought that one of my paintings could always have been otherwise. The composition and arrangement of colors could have been different if the random number generator had given me different numbers. This kind of contingency gives the work a certain air of mystery that I am fascinated by. 

9

My work is also a comment on the outsourcing of creativity, which is happening to an increasing degree with the rapid acceptance of Artificial Intelligence. In my paintings, randomness moves within a predetermined framework that I have created. This human-made structure is indeed necessary to contextualize chance occurrences and hopefully make them more interesting. Human ingenuity is not completely replaced, but rather reinvigorated by the use of randomness, as it has been by many tools that humans have invented throughout history. 

10

For me, my art of randomness is also about finding a way to accept the unforeseen, the imperfect, and even the tragic. Very often, we don’t like risk and unpredictability because we want to be in control, we want things to go according to plan. I know I do. But the world isn’t fair, and things happen that can crush us physically and mentally. We have to find a way to accept these things as meaningful and valuable, or at the very least be able to adapt and tolerate them. In my paintings in which I use randomness, the unplanned is part of the plan, maybe even the biggest part. What would it be like if we lived our lives with this attitude? What frameworks do we have to set up for ourselves, emotionally speaking, that make chance palatable and even profitable?

11

One last word about the titles of my recent paintings as they relate to randomness. I started using palindromic or palindromesque titles when I brought in randomness to my studio practice through the use of an online random number generator. In the beginning, I was intrigued by how the word ‘random’ looked a little like ‘modular’ spelled backwards. So I combined the two to make the title of the first series, Randomodular, which was very modular in composition, and I just kept that idea of reversal going by using palindromes or near-palindromes that begin and end with the letter ’r’. Also, it seems to me that randomness is like a palindrome. It can go either way.