Ideograms of Perception
The RGB series begins with a radical gesture: transforming words into visual ideograms, inviting the viewer to decode them and participate in an act of creative and critical interpretation. In this way, the work becomes a space that fosters connection, where meaning emerges from the interaction between the piece, the viewer and its linguistic or cultural context. This approach brings to light the active process of constructing meaning, prompting reflection on order and hierarchy in both language and visual perception.
“An image is a spectrum of light decoded by the retina”, but we do not all decode it in the same way. This series engages with the trichromatic theory of vision (Young-Helmholtz), which explains how the human eye perceives colour through three types of cones. However, it challenges its universality: what happens when biology meets culture? Or when technology imposes its own rules of representation?
The RGB (red, green, blue) system, the basis of additive colour synthesis on screens and digital devices, is transformed here into a ‘visual alphabet’ that encodes meaning. RGB is the hidden language of the digital world, a code that defines not only how we see the world, but how it is presented to us. Its technical universality, however, clashes with the diversity of human perception: colour blindness, cultural differences in the interpretation of colour, or individual variability in sensitivity to shades. Thus, the series explores the duality between the objective (the light spectrum) and the subjective (its interpretation).
But this project goes beyond a metaphor for perception: it questions the RGB standardisation system, which seeks to standardise the visual experience. RGB is the dominant system in screens, cameras and digital design, but it is also a limitation. Technical faults—broken pixels, distorted colours—reveal an uncomfortable truth: digital perfection is an illusion. These glitches, whilst not the focus of the series, serve as a reminder that technology is not infallible and that its apparent neutrality conceals biases and exclusions.
In this work, RGB—an abstract system—becomes tangible through continuous lines. Here, the digital is re-materialised, challenging the notion that the virtual lacks a physical form or material consequences.
By translating the ideograms into different languages, the series explores how multilingualism and cultural relativity make our understanding of and interaction with others more flexible. Colour (RGB) is a universal system, but its name is cultural: ‘rojo’ in Spanish, ‘red’ in English, ‘rot’ in German… As Saussure pointed out, there is no natural relationship between the linguistic sign and the colour it designates. This arbitrariness links the work to structural linguistics and conceptual art, where meaning is not given but constructed.
Language, like colour, is an arbitrary code. There is no ‘correct’ way to perceive it, just as there is no single way to interpret an image. This idea calls for active tolerance: the recognition that difference is not an obstacle, but an essential condition of communication.