Torso function

A function is a relation that uniquely associates members of one set with members of another set. Against the inertia of matter and causation, the function prioritizes interrelation, transformation, and the infinitesimal. While as an applied logic, it offers the comfort of new maps, and with these maps, new domains of thought and experience, the function also carries with it ambivalence and ambiguity. Emerging in the late 19th century, with Ernst Mach and others, functions offer a way out of the sequential and into the continuous.

A permutation is a function that performs a rearrangement of the elements of a set. In the torsi on display, the original colors(cyan, magenta, and yellow) from a reproduction of Ruben’s Bellona from the Medici cycle in the Louvre are displayed in their six possible sequences: CMY, CYM, MCY, MYC, YCM, YMC.

Approximating a printing process with oil glazes is imprecise, but nonetheless seems to reorganize the color material in a way that differentiates one from the next, doing so in a way that demonstrates the regular spacing along the hue circle as each new combination takes place. Taken together, they constitute a model of the color space derived from the original. 

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975 in Louisiana, USA) currently lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1997. His work was recently included in Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome, Italy (2019) and in Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2019). Thompson’s work was the subject of an exhibition with Sam Lewitt at The Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic (2017). Other solo exhibitions include Cheyney Thompson The Completed Reference: Pedestals and Drunken Walks, at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2012); and Cheyney Thompson: metric, pedestal, landlord, cabengo, recit, at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2012). 

His works were included in Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (2008) and as well as in Venice Biennale, curated by Francesco Bonami (2003). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.