Echo Chamber

In Echo Chamber, Menon expands his decade-long inquiry into the relationship between abstraction, human labor, machine logic, and perception in an increasingly screen-saturated world. This exhibition situates his recent paintings within a broader inquiry into the epistemologies of perception, the nature of information, and the fluctuating boundaries between human and machine authorship.
Menon’s practice is grounded in a durational, meditative methodology in which repetitive mark-making functions simultaneously as gesture, discipline, and data. Through the incremental layering of translucent acrylic paint washes and accumulations of line-work created with brushes, paint markers, and calligraphy pens, these paintings enact a logic of emergence, where structure arises through repetition rather than predetermined design.

Central to the work is the concept of “aesthetic failure”: glitches, errors, and digital noise become generative agents that disrupt the purely algorithmic order. In this sense, Menon’s painted surfaces operate as analog counterparts to digital noise, producing optical interference patterns that fluctuate with the viewer’s proximity to the paintings. Viewing distance becomes an active component of the work: from afar, fields of lines appear to converge into shapes and tonal planes reminiscent of geometric abstraction and color field painting; up close, the structure dissolves into intricate, pulsating networks of marks. This oscillation generates a subjective optical ‘interference’ responsive to the viewer’s movement in situ. They invite viewers to inhabit a space where noise becomes signal, where repetition crystallizes into form, and where the boundary between human agency and algorithmic influence remains deliberately unresolved.

Ultimately, Menon’s artworks are not an argument for or against technology but an articulation of the subtle, shifting terrain between them. In the contemplative density of these surfaces, the viewer encounters an echo not of sound but of cognition, attention, and the nature of information itself, through abstraction.