Richard Graville’s paintings, executed using a mixture of matt and high-gloss paints, depict abstract forms infused with emphatic, sign-like qualities. He developed his work by analysing the secret codes of animal colouration. The paintings incorporate the strategies that animals use to warn and deceive their predators while also attracting mates. By isolating these strategies, he reflects on how meaning arises from our biology and explores how the same codes of animal colouration manifest in technology and artificial intelligence.
text by Phillip Hawker
‘Upon first encountering Richard’s paintings, I interpreted their simple geometry as anchored in minimalist art’s familiar look. However, such an impulsive assumption led me into a cognitive bias trap contained within the paintings. The sleek, cool look of 20th-century minimal painting captures the viewer’s attention, thus becoming unknowingly hijacked and bewitched by the effects of the underlying codes and content of their biological origin. It was a surprise that such inorganic, almost machine-made paintings could have, as a source, the stories, behaviours, and impulses of zoological survival codes honed by natural selection. These survivalist species tactics, including the human, become the condensed source for the paintings, determining scale, colour and paint finish. In human society, we utilise these colour combinations to make crude signs that protect us in dangerous situations. The paintings use the same colours and formats as these signs.
Prolonged looking also plays a vital role in the process Richard intends to solicit. Limiting colour and gestural detail allows the painting to ‘operate’, encouraging the viewer to spend time exploring its surface. Subtle changes in surface sheen and colour density summon deep primal reactions within us that are so involuntary we hardly register them. They explore the space where our visual sense starts to break down, and we glimpse what we call ‘mystery’. As Richard explains, “My job is to strip everything else away so that I can illuminate what underpins our perceptions. Although I mimic aspects of formalist painting, I don’t share the same concerns. My paintings are diagrammatic, not abstract. I use geometry to maintain focus. My paintings use codes that would exist without humans.”
This focus provokes preconscious reactions in the viewer, triggering thoughts, feelings, or memories that dwell beneath the surface. Deeper still is the evolutionary hard-wiring of codes vital to species survival. Primal signals developed within the animal kingdom over millions of years are simplified and organised, permitting just enough information to present their purpose for being. Using this de-cluttering process, the paintings become blueprints that explore how nature works and NOT how it looks through a romanticised lens.
“I combine two essential principles: aposematism (advertising dangerous aspects) and cryptic (concealment) colouration. I make a direct presentation of these principles. I use aposematism to gain your attention. I use cryptic strategies to make other aspects of the painting strange and less legible. On a perceptual level, you must work slightly harder and have less certainty. You have to participate. In that way, I utilise these codes to capture attention AND imagination.”
Richard sidesteps historical theories of abstraction, rejecting claims of theosophical universality. Instead, he considers these codes and protocols as signs relevant to our biological niche. The paintings act as attention-seeking devices that manipulate these codes into seducing, warning or deceiving ‘machines’. Emotions are an alert system - to either move closer to or avoid something. For myself, being with the paintings provokes unexpected feelings; malevolence, threat, virility and beauty.
Engaging with Richard’s paintings, especially for some time, allows them to throw switches in the mind. Initially disguised behind a minimalist smokescreen, feelings are activated as they seductively pulsate and perplex. Artificial creatures staking their claim to exist.’
‘Consider supernormal stimuli, a design glitch found in many organisms. Niko Tinbergen’s experiments with seagulls revealed a curious bias in their perceptual/behavioral machinery. The adult female has an orange spot on her beak, at which her chicks instinctually peck, to stimulate their mother to regurgitate and feed them. What if the orange spot were bigger or smaller, brighter or less distinct? Tinbergen showed that chicks would peck even more readily at exaggerated cardboard models of the orange spot, that supernormal stimuli evoked supernormal behaviors. Tinbergen also showed that birds that laid light blue, gray-dappled eggs preferred to sit on a bright blue black polka-dotted fake egg so large that they slid off it repeatedly.’
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
Daniel Dennett
For great bustards, “beauty is poison.” New research reveals that males of this species consume small doses of a highly toxic compound to rid themselves of internal parasites to look healthier and sexier for female birds.
Researchers from the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences discovered the bustards’ beauty secret after combing through hundreds of faeces samples collected in the field and dissecting several birds. These investigations showed that male great bustards had consumed a notable amount of blister beetles. A black and red insect that uses its conspicuous colouration to warn potential predators of its toxicity. It produces cantharidin that can kill many animals, including humans. Great bustards tolerate cantharidin, but large doses are lethal.
While females did eat a few of the beetles, an excessive amount of those insects turned up in the males’ systems. The researchers hypothesised that the bustards might be self-medicating for something. They performed separate tests to see how various bacteria might react to the poison, including ones that cause sexually transmitted bird diseases. The doses of cantharidin in the birds’ faeces were enough to kill off bacteria.
The researchers recognised that male great bustards eat just enough toxic beetles to clear their systems of STDs and other diseases before the mating season. The Great Bustard is a polygynous bird with extreme male competition for female access. The team found the highest concentration of beetles during the time that males put on elaborate courtship dances.
Part of that selection process involves the female inspecting the male’s cloaca, i.e. the bird’s rear end. ”A white, clean cloaca with no infection symptoms (e.g. diarrhoea) is a signal of resistance to cantharidin and the absence of parasites. It represents a reliable indicator of the male quality to the extremely picky females.” Finding a mate is worth the males’ risk of death by beetle poisoning.
Adaptive Coloration in Animals
Hugh B.Cott