Number of People

Number of People, 2025
four parts, digital prints on tarpaulin, hand-scraped openings, wooden stretcher frames
7 People, 9 People, 13 People 240 × 160 x 3 cm, 10 People 210 × 336 x 3 cm
first image: exhibition visualization

Number of People revisits the tableau through deliberately blunt means. The dimensions of the four works derive from lift floor plans and their stated occupancy limits. Rotated from horizontal plans into vertical images, these regulated spaces become pictorial fields in which the human figure appears only as a repeatable unit.

Each “person” is reduced to three circular signs—one for the head, two for the arms—printed on white tarpaulin stretched over wooden frames. The marked areas are then scraped open by hand with an electric tool. Yet this manual intervention does not constitute an act of expressive freedom. Rather, it stages a creator-subject conditioned by rules of play: forms, positions and actions have already been prescribed. The only place where something resembling the artist’s “handwriting” appears is in the crude, laborious scraping along predetermined outlines—an impoverished residue of authorship rather than its triumphant assertion.

The people themselves possess no psychological or social agency. Their only efficacy resides in their positions within the lift. Seen from above, those positions generate the awkward compositions of the tableaux: arrangements not freely composed but inherited from the spatial distribution of counted bodies. Once rotated, stretched and mounted, these contingent configurations become wall-hung objects entering circulation and valuation in the art market.

A neutral sans-serif designation is repeated in a pseudo-handwritten typeface. The second inscription appears more personal, yet is as generic as the first: an off-the-shelf simulation of handwriting that echoes rather than interrupts the administrative language of number and capacity.

In 10 People, the structure becomes more explicitly theatrical. The occupancy diagram is enclosed within a rectangular field and embedded in a broad, stage-like format. Beside it appears a diffuse violet mark, recalling the coloured tagging of specimens in behavioural research. Yet the mark is not attached to any of the depicted “people”; instead, it functions like an experimental stimulus introduced into the viewing situation, tacitly shifting behavioural observation onto the beholder. What initially resembles a spontaneous act of spraying reveals itself on closer inspection as digitally printed. The work thus presents a tableau within a tableau: a quoted scene of making, marking and observation in which even the apparent spraying gesture exists only as an image.

Across the group, figure, support, capacity and commodity form become inseparable. The “people” enter as spatial data; the creator, only as an operator carrying out given instructions. Through the scraped openings, the wall and parts of the stretcher construction remain visible, allowing the absent bodies to expose both the institutional ground on which they appear and the hidden apparatus that holds the image in place.