MedhanshSeth

Medhansh Seth is a New Delhi–based artist whose mosaic practice reinterprets the Rubik's Cube as a unit of colour rather than an object to be solved.

His relationship with the cube predates the artwork. Years of competitive speedcubing trained an unusual familiarity with the object — its mechanics, its colour system, its permutations, its repetition and its physical behaviour. He has taught it as well as competed with it.

In the mosaics that relationship is inverted. The cube is no longer solved for itself. Hundreds of individually configured cubes are subordinated to a larger image, and each one is turned until a single face is right and then never touched again.

Viewed closely the work remains stubbornly mechanical — plastic, seams, grids and six colours. Viewed from distance those constraints collapse into skin, shadow, expression and identity. The work depends not only on the object but on perception itself.

I am interested in what happens when an image is denied almost everything normally required to reproduce it accurately.

There is no skin colour in a Rubik's Cube. No brown. No grey. No blended shadow. No brush capable of correcting a transition. There are six colours and a grid.

The rest has to happen in the arrangement — and eventually in the eye of the person looking at it.