VAGUE November

Jan van Eyck Academie Open Studios, March 2020

“The CMYK color model is used in nearly all printed matter today. By Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s own account, its four primary pigments, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, comprise the most effective means available to print on a mass scale. Both the CMYK model, and the images it is used to reproduce and disseminate, underpin many facets of Barrois’ critical gestures. Often working with images excised from men’s fashion magazines, he continually tests, stretches, and undermines the system’s limits. At times this is executed with the most minimal of adjustments, at others by means of radical intervention.

For Barrois’ the four CMYK colors are a collaborative system that, when working together, can create infinite possibilities. As a subtractive printing method, however, it relies on a white ground to be made visible. Barrois’ works lay bare some of the mechanisms by which the CMYK model, like all systems, becomes encoded with bias.

At Jan Van Eyck, Barrois has produced four works, all drawn from a single issue of Vogue Netherlands magazine from November 2018. Each composition is devoted to one of the four CMYK colors. Barrois isolates instances in the magazine where each pigment occurs, creating, in his words, a flattening of subjects while also tracking the application of these colors in the fashion industry at large. These compositions build on Barrois’ continuing exploration into magazines as vehicles to analyze the consumption of images and the formation of identity and desire.”

-Amanda Saroff, 2020