Building Colours by SOAL Studio: A Colour at Every Crossing

Building Colours by SOAL Studio is a geometric art print in which almost nothing holds a single colour of its own. The large square at the centre of the sheet is a warm gold where it lies on open ground, and orange where it crosses the circle behind it. One shape, two colours, and the second one belongs to neither the square nor the circle.

Read the title as a description of the picture and it tells you very little. Read it as an instruction and it tells you how the picture was made.

Building Colours is a geometric art print by SOAL Studio in Copenhagen. It is built from overlapping circles, squares and triangles, with a new colour appearing wherever two shapes cross. It comes in two colour editions, Sunrise and Dusk, and three sizes, printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g.

The colours are made on the sheet, not chosen for it

Every strong colour in Building Colours is a consequence of one shape lying over another, rather than a colour picked in advance and filled in.

The square shows it most plainly. Outside the circle it is a warm gold that cools towards yellow green at its foot. Inside the circle it is orange, running down to amber. Nothing about the square itself changed. Only what sits behind it did. The same shape carries two colours at once, and the boundary between them is not an edge drawn around a colour. It is the rim of the circle, showing through.

The Dusk edition does exactly the same thing with an entirely different set of colours. There the square is a deep indigo on open ground and a clear bright blue where the circle crosses it. The rule holds in both editions, which is how you can tell it is the method rather than a decorative accident.

Very little here is a flat colour either. The triangle pointing right from the middle of the sheet does not hold one green. It ramps continuously from a pale yellow green at its base to a deep green at its tip, and in Dusk the same triangle travels from near black indigo to magenta. Almost every large area is moving, slowly, from one colour to another across its own width.

Put those two things together and the print ends up holding more colours than it holds shapes. There is no swatch list you could write down and hand to someone that would let them rebuild it, because most of what you are looking at was made at the crossings.

A few straight lines, and everything else laid across them

Underneath the circles and triangles, the sheet is divided by a small number of straight horizontal and vertical lines into plain rectangular panels.

That grid is the quietest thing in the picture and it is doing most of the work. It sets the two columns in the lower half, it fixes where the square begins and ends, and it gives every other shape something to push against. Not one of the curved or angled shapes stops at a panel edge. The large circle crosses four of them. The quarter circle at the foot of the sheet runs off the bottom. The small striped disc on the right sits astride a boundary rather than inside a panel.

Two areas refuse a flat fill altogether. The triangle resting on the top edge of the square is filled with fine diagonal stripes, and the broad field in the lower left, along with that small disc, carries a regular grid of dots. SOAL Studio describes this texture as drawn from photography. On the print it reads as a change of surface, a place where the eye slows down between two areas that would otherwise meet as pure colour.

The studio mark sits low on the right, and it is worth noticing that it is not printed in a fixed colour. In Sunrise it is a pale magenta on pink. In Dusk it is a dark teal on green. Even the signature takes its colour from the edition it belongs to.

Raining Lemons by SOAL Studio is the other print in the NOKUKO catalogue built from nothing but circles, stripes and repeated form, with no subject anywhere in it. That post is about what pattern on its own can do to a room, quietly. Building Colours works with the same materials and takes the volume up several steps, and the two prints already appear together in one of the room photographs on that page. Building Colours arrived at NOKUKO in November 2023, alongside Ocean Dreams, in the post that introduced SOAL Studio to the gallery.

Sunrise and Dusk, and choosing a size

Sunrise and Dusk hold the identical drawing, so what separates them is the level of light each one brings to a wall.

Sunrise runs hot and high: coral, amber, magenta and cyan, with a pale pink and a sky blue at the top corners. It supplies its own daylight, which is why it can hold a dim corner or a north facing room without looking sunk. Dusk runs deep and saturated: teal, royal blue, bottle green, burnt orange and a hard red at the right edge. It has the density not to be flattened by a bright room, and the room photograph on the product page hangs it against a deep green wall, where it holds its own comfortably.

Three sizes are available: 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. Because the picture is built from large flat areas rather than fine detail, it stays fully legible at the smallest size in a way that a densely drawn print does not. At 70x100 cm the individual shapes stop reading as shapes and begin behaving as fields of colour instead.

Every print is made on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g and carries the distinctive mark of SOAL Studio. For each one sold, a tree is planted.

A print like this asks a room for very little. It has no horizon, no figure and no place it wants you to look first, so it does not compete with whatever is already on the wall or in the chairs.

What it does instead is keep making colours while you are not watching. The gold turning to orange under the circle. The green sliding down its own triangle. The mark changing colour with the edition. None of it announces itself, and all of it is still there the next time you look.

About Building Colours

What paper is Building Colours printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g, the heavier art paper NOKUKO uses for its art prints, chosen for how faithfully it holds strongly saturated colour.

What sizes does Building Colours come in?
Three: 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. Each size is available in both the Sunrise and the Dusk edition.

What is the difference between the Sunrise and Dusk editions?
The drawing is identical in both. Sunrise is the warm, high key version, built on coral, amber and magenta. Dusk is the deep version, built on teal, royal blue and bottle green. Sunrise brings light into a darker room. Dusk holds its own in a bright one.

Is Building Colours exclusive to NOKUKO?
Yes. Building Colours is available exclusively at NOKUKO, and every print carries the distinctive mark of SOAL Studio. It is an open edition rather than a limited one, so it does not come with a certificate of authenticity. For every print sold, a tree is planted.

Written by NOKUKO.