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This operation remains even when the geometric form disappears. In later painting the plane can be opened not by a cube, tube or cone but by fog, indeterminacy, a state in which the image seems about to appear but has not yet appeared. The means change, but the same problem remains: how to hold form at the moment of emergence, preventing it from finally closing into a sign or a stable image. Noise Index, White Mold, spatial forms and the later “fog” can therefore be understood not as separate stylistic periods but as a sequence of different instruments in the same work of opening form.

One of the starting problems in our painting was the openness of form. A painting already separates itself from the wall and from the world: it acquires boundaries and forms a certain whole. But for this wholeness — for the surface or the medium itself — to become visible, a breakdown is needed: noise, a rupture. At first such a rupture could be an uneven ground, a patch of colour, a cut, a puncture, a brush trace, an imprint, or a hole left in the earth by a fid. These were not images but gestures. For us, Noise was not a characteristic of the image but an instrument that intervenes in a form that has already emerged and prevents it from finally closing.