Thursday, January 29, 2026

From Hyperplastic Perception to the Politics of Sociochromatic Autonomy * Urban Chromatic Intensities



Urban Chromatic Intensities, as articulated in Monocromías Endémicas, propose a decisive reorientation of the city from representational field to vibratory chromatic matrix, yet this reorientation demands theoretical resistance rather than acceptance. The project’s reliance on Chromatic Autonomy—where objects, surfaces, and fragments operate as “sociochromatic particles”—risks naturalising colour as a self-legitimising agent detached from its infrastructural and ideological conditions. By asserting that monochromy condenses the dispersed city into affective intensities, the work privileges perceptual saturation over socio-material analysis. Contemporary art theory has long warned against such perceptual essentialism: colour does not merely reveal urban life but participates in regimes of visibility that are historically and politically produced. The hyperplastic city, framed as an immense chromatic body, becomes a closed circuit of sensation, where intensity substitutes for critique. This is not a failure of method but a conceptual limit: chromatic condensation, while formally rigorous, can obscure the labour, regulation, and asymmetries embedded in urban surfaces. The city’s “overlooked tonal consistencies” are not innocent phenomena awaiting discovery; they are effects of planning, capital, decay, and maintenance. To treat them as autonomous aesthetic events risks converting urban complexity into a consumable visual rhythm, reinforcing what might be termed an aesthetic of urban immediacy rather than a politics of urban relation.



The procedural logic of the work—particularly its modular grids and serial openness—invites a second interrogation around Seriality as Ideology. The 12X matrix and twin-frame logic promise non-linearity and infinite recombination, yet seriality here operates less as liberation than as a governing structure that disciplines perception. The repetition of paired images produces a visual rhetoric of balance and equivalence that smooths difference into pattern. In this sense, the grid does not merely organise colour; it distributes attention, neutralising conflict in favour of rhythmic coherence. Contemporary critiques of modular form remind us that openness is not synonymous with emancipation: a system can be expandable and still prescriptive. The claim that each unit “retains autonomy while entering in tension with others” must be questioned, since autonomy within a rigid serial grammar is always conditional. The viewer’s gaze is guided, if not choreographed, by the accumulation of sameness-with-variation, producing an aestheticised urban totality that resists interruption. Seriality thus becomes an ideological device, one that aligns with late-capitalist logics of accumulation and display, where difference is absorbed as variation without consequence. The installation’s promise of infinite rearrangement paradoxically stabilises meaning, reinforcing chromatic harmony over urban dissonance.



A further problem emerges in the work’s repositioning of the camera as an agent of collection, a “spoon” gathering fragments into series, which foregrounds The Hyperplastic Gaze as a privileged epistemology. This gaze claims to move beyond documentary neutrality, yet it risks reproducing a subtler form of extraction. By suspending the ordinary and converting mundane surfaces into “intense chromatic statements,” the work aestheticises urban matter while withholding its narratives of use, neglect, or contestation. The politics of perception, invoked as a central outcome, remain largely internal to the visual field. Contemporary art theory insists that perception is not merely sensory but relational, shaped by bodies, histories, and exclusions. A hyperplastic gaze that intensifies colour without situating the observer within power relations risks functioning as an elevated viewpoint, one that consumes the city as texture rather than engaging it as lived space. The monochrome object, stripped of context, becomes emblematic rather than implicated. What is lost is the friction between colour and consequence, between surface intensity and social depth. The city, rendered as saturated sensorium, risks becoming an abstract field of aesthetic availability rather than a contested terrain of coexistence.






Finally, the project’s invocation of a socio-plastic lens gestures toward relational thinking, yet its full implications remain underdeveloped. A genuinely critical deployment of Socio-Plastic Relationality would require colour to be understood not as an autonomous agent but as a mediator within networks of human and non-human actors. Urban chromatic intensities do not simply pulse; they negotiate with regulation, climate, surveillance, and cultural coding. To foreground monochromy as a method of focus is productive only if that focus sharpens relational awareness rather than narrowing it to perceptual intensity. Contemporary practice increasingly demands that aesthetic systems expose their own conditions of operation, revealing how form participates in power. In this light, Endemic Monochromes might be re-read not as a culmination but as a threshold: a system that must be pushed beyond formal condensation toward critical entanglement. Colour’s political potential lies not in its saturation but in its capacity to articulate difference, conflict, and situatedness. Without this expansion, the sociochromatic particle risks remaining a beautifully sealed unit—vivid, rhythmic, and ultimately self-referential. Read through the critical framework of Anto Lloveras and the Socioplastic Mesh, Monocromías Endémicas emerges as a pivotal yet unresolved experiment—one that foregrounds chromatic perception while demanding a deeper articulation of relational, political, and infrastructural entanglements within contemporary urban art practice.



SOCIOPLASTIC MESH: CORE SELECTION (2% AUTHORITY)


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