Data, Dust, and the Discipline of Lines

On what feels like the hottest morning in late July, I climb out of a stuffy subway station in Queens, New York, on to a near-empty intersection, save for a diner with a few late breakfast-goers and a couple of cars idling at the signal. It’s my first time in Long Island City and I’m drawn to its quietness — the empty sidewalks, trimmed hedges outside two-storeyed homes and raw, exposed concrete — a contrast to the glittering facades and pulsing streets of Manhattan. I turn the corner onto a building I would have missed, had the Kochi-born, Coimbatore-raised abstract artist I am scheduled to meet not warned me of the confusing street numbers. No signage or prominent identifier, just a small printed number on the door and “Visakh Menon” on an inconspicuous list of studio tenants confirmed that I am in the right place.

For the last two weeks, several visits to the posthumous retrospective of American artist Jack Whitten at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had consumed my days, the understanding I was seeking eluding me with each viewing. That unfinished conversation started decades ago in Whitten’s studio, moved through the MoMA galleries and seems to have been carried forward in Visakh Menon’s studio, where it is alive and restless. Earlier in the month, I had reached out to Menon, a multidisciplinary artist, creative director and educator whose work spans drawing, painting, media art and interactive design, while on my entirely accidental, Whitten-inspired quest to unpack abstraction.

I soon find myself inside Menon’s studio, a place of experimentation and study, a “laboratory”, as he calls it. I encounter paintings stacked high, drawers revealing new bodies of work, tables crowded with tools, 3D prints and overlapping lines and shapes everywhere. There are traces of earlier artistic endeavours too: Menon began almost exclusively in video and media installation after completing his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 2007 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, only later finding his way into painting. Paper scrolls containing mysterious ideas, colour studies and workstations for 3D printing and digital processes hint at a structured yet porous practice — a space to think, experiment, execute, reflect and also archive. Menon tells me, “Having the studio changed my practice in a lot of ways because now I had room to mess around.”

Despite our previous email correspondence, he admits that he is not quite sure what it is I want from him. Verve’s proposition had him intrigued but puzzled, and he had decided to take a leap. My goal, I explain, is straightforward — to grasp the underlying reasons, mechanisms, and nuances of abstraction.

The Infinite Possibilities Of Abstraction
When I first walked into Jack Whitten: The Messenger at the MoMA, I stopped repeatedly, slowly making my way through the opening room containing the initial decade of work: dense, gestural abstractions that bore traces of Willem de Kooning’s influence. An oeuvre spanning five more decades unfolded in the connecting rooms.

Experiencing the work of Whitten for the first time made the galleries seem almost sentient. Charged with the memory of his world, the surfaces echoed his lived Black experience. Whitten, an artist from Alabama, became a pioneering abstract painter in New York in the ’60s. His life and work were rooted in the struggles and spirit of Black history; from segregated Alabama to jazz clubs in New York, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy to the streets he walked, where the events he witnessed and the objects he collected found their way onto his canvases. I returned more than once, tracing how Whitten’s abstraction holds the weight of history and the warmth of personal memory, fractured and pieced together like the mosaics he so often built.

Having seen the varied works of both the artists in isolation, I wanted to understand the language of abstraction through their interrelatedness. To this end, Menon, a resident at Alfred’s Institute of Electronic Art and now an adjunct lecturer in the Communications Design Department at NY City College of Technology (CUNY), Brooklyn, agreed to do a walkthrough of the show with me.

As I trail Menon on my final visit to the museum, jazz hums in the background — John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington — echoes of the same music that once vibrated through Whitten’s studio. I look at the work through Menon’s lens, asking him sometimes naive questions but for the most part observing him, seeing what he is drawn to, trying to understand his context and ideas, vis-à-vis Whitten. “There is always this idea of asking, what does it mean?” says Menon. “It’s kind of a pointless exercise for me, because most good things in life don’t mean anything. We just experience them.”

Information And Malfunction
What keeps Menon going is a constant influx of information: patterns from data streams, the logic of code and corrupted files, scientific imagery, the noise of digital life that somehow filters into his marks and patterns. Menon’s intensely manual drawing process, his visual “feedback loops” that feel like static, cosmic maps, or data flows — all record emotional and collective states in a way that’s abstract but deeply felt. As I understand it, for him, abstraction emerges from the collapse, distortion and reinterpretation of data; a reflection of living in an age where images, signals and knowledge can no longer be taken at face value.

Whitten, too, often described his works as memorials or time capsules, encoding historical events, spiritual reflections, or tributes to people like Martin Luther King Jr. or abstract expressionist painter Norman Lewis, who was a mentor and friend. In the horizontal raking of black and white acrylics in Mee I (1977), from Whitten’s The Greek Alphabet Paintings, Menon sees biological forms that also read like a glitched image, and in Prime Mover (1974), a blurry mix of soft taupes, ashen greys and mossy greens with a distinct use of “disruptors”, he sees a smashed-up TV, still hazy with signal, rushing left and right entirely because of the process that brought it into being. This balance of control and collapse — of perfection that is not quite perfect — is what fascinates him.  “So right but it’s not,” as he puts it. In comparison, he says, “I’m a lot more controlled. I want it to be straight, so I try to make it straight.”

Menon’s Tremors series (2018-2021), for instance, speaks to the invisible “floating” forces that impact our lives: signals, waves, cellular hums, Wi-Fi, the imperceptible tremours of the world whether they are manmade or natural. “It’s very easy to look at the works in Tremors and think about them as sound waves or seismograph readings…how a little blip on a graph could mean life or death, could mean massive fortune or losing all your wealth or having a bad signal or being in the middle of an earthquake and so on.”

Jack Whitten’s Influence
Menon admires how Whitten assimilated the technologies of his time — phones, apps, the language of modern computing — into the language of geometric abstraction, making painting itself a form of documentation. This also reaffirms his own instincts about what the process can hold.

He remembers vividly his first encounter with Whitten’s series made from tiles of dried acrylic, and being struck by how radically it expanded the very possibilities of the medium. It was at a 2011 show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York that he saw how in Apps for Obama (2011), an acrylic collage comparable to icons for apps on a smartphone, the canvas became not just a formal experiment, but a record of the moment. Long before “data” became a cultural shorthand, Whitten was already translating its visual and conceptual presence onto canvas. At our MoMA visit, the achromatic grid of acrylic tiles in Data II (1991) reminded Menon of pixelated black-and-white monitors, of eight-bit images from the early days of personal computing, collapsing the boundaries between paint and screen. This, too, felt far ahead of its time.

By the ’80s, Whitten embarked on what would become his signature late-career innovation: painting as mosaics. After a tragic studio fire in 1980 destroyed some of his work, Whitten radically changed course. He began casting acrylic in moulds (using found objects like grease graters, shoe soles and fishing nets to fashion patterns and textures) to create hardened chips and tiles. He called these pieces his “tesserae” (after the tiny tiles in ancient mosaics). With this “dry palette” of acrylic fragments, he started assembling paintings piece by piece. Whitten said abstraction allowed him to process what couldn’t be shown — grief, trauma, memory, soul. His painting 9.11.01 (2006) – a giant-sized mosaic work made of acrylic, ash, blood, hair, glass, glitter, soot and mixed media on canvas — incorporated real debris and became a vessel for mourning.

The grief that drove Whitten to make 9.11.01 is palpable. He lived just blocks from the World Trade Center and for five years, it was all he could paint: not an image of what he saw, but a residue of what was felt. I sit on the bench in front of it, reading the text, listening to Whitten’s own voice describing the moment the plane flew overhead, feeling that collective chill he spoke of. He called it the “particularities of violence” — the way trauma crawls under your skin and grief embeds itself in the city’s bones.

Whitten once wrote, “There are things we know but cannot see.” In this show, those things glimmer just under the paint, waiting to crack you open too.

Me (reading aloud from the studio log): ‘My paintings are objects designed for the spirit to have a place of rest.’

Menon: That’s beautiful, yeah I can’t write at all.

Me: I really like that line because you were speaking about how you don’t believe art can change the world. But it’s giving you a minute to enjoy….

Menon: ….to unplug….

Me: ….yeah, and I feel like that is also rest?

Menon: Yes! Kind of rest, detach yourself from everything else that is going on.
(Now talking about the list “To avoid at all costs”) I love the fact that number one on that list is “Formalism” and number 18 is “Art History” and then “Self Pity”.

In The Studio
Although it changes with each series, each of Menon’s projects typically begins outside the studio with photographs of fleeting visual incidents; a shaft of light on a wall, the shimmer on a building’s corner. Early in his career, Menon would run these images through custom programmes designed to “destroy” them, producing endless glitch-like variations before moving fully into the physical process. Now, he rarely treats them as reference points as he feels the “base emotion” has solidified. Sketches, doodles and extensive colour studies follow, as colour is the only element he carefully plans. Foreground and background relationships, he explains, can completely shift perception: “Grey tones on top of light or dark colours completely change what you’re seeing.” Composition, meanwhile, evolves through a kind of old-school abstraction: make a move, then respond to what appears. From there, the work unfolds in layers — flat fields of paint, pencil lines mapping angles, days of masking tape and line upon line drawn with refillable acrylic paint markers, ink, watercolour or one of the other mediums he is currently experimenting with.

Repetition And Obsession
I question Menon whether his meditative, repetitive mark-making began in Coimbatore or developed more recently and he is quick to clarify that it was in fact not rooted in childhood. Repetition, Menon explains, only entered his work around 2012–13, but the impulse was always there. “I’ve always had this obsessive quality,” he says. “Eventually it manifested itself in these drawings and paintings.” Sculpture, too, is on the horizon, not as a departure but as another surface for this obsessiveness to play out. Information has been his ground for a long time and he doesn’t see that changing — whether through painting, drawing, or what comes next, the processes are always tied by repetition.

His preferred tools are a ruler, a set of marks, masking tape. “From a process standpoint, it’s pretty straightforward. I use a ruler, I draw straight lines.”

Whitten’s Tools
For Menon, the fascination with Whitten lies in what he was able to draw out of the very surface of the canvas. Looking at works like The Pariah Way (1973), he notes how the marks read almost like wounds — gashes or scars — that emerge not from representation but from process. Each trace comes from Whitten’s interventions; dragging saw blades through wet paint, pressing wire or sheet metal beneath the surface, or embedding small objects like stones and string. He called these interruptions “disruptors”, tools that forced the canvas to react in unexpected ways. He used improvised tools — his giant wooden developer, rakes, rubber squeegees, even Afro-combs — pulling wet layers of acrylic across canvas laid flat, letting textures emerge through frottage. 

What results feels both accidental and inevitable, marks recall scar tissue or the memory of a wound. Crucially, none of this was pre-planned. Whitten set up the conditions for it to happen, then worked with whatever the surface revealed. His method of dragging his “Developer” and other tools across the canvas, using disruptors, left room for “accidents” and surprises. This attention to chance resonates deeply with Menon’s own practice. “It’s taken me a long time,” he reflects, “to move away from the impulse to control everything, to see chance not as a mistake but as something to notice, to seize, to carry forward.” Whitten had grasped this decades earlier, allowing his canvases to become sites where process and accident intertwined. Menon points to Homecoming: For Miles (1992) — a tribute to Miles Davis — as an example. According to him, this work may carry a jazz-inflected title, but its surface could just as easily evoke the depths of the cosmos: a James Webb satellite image, galaxies shimmering in the dark. “We can interpret it in 20 different ways,” he notes, “or we can set all of that aside and just look at the process. How did he make this? What was the material doing?”

Menon’s Mechanical Approach
Menon’s abstraction is not just conceptual but it is also mechanical, shaped by tools he often engineers for himself. Pen racks and multi-blade cutters are a few of the devices he’s 3D printed in his studio. While some have suggested he sell these tools, others warn him to guard them from imitation. For Menon, the point is not the tool itself but the obsessive labour it enables. As his studio mate once remarked, “I could make any of these tools, but I’m not crazy enough to draw a hundred thousand lines.”

Process-based abstraction is a framework where one doesn’t need an epiphany to begin, just the discipline to keep working within a self-imposed system. There are constants in terms of what he is doing and then there are variables that he can structure. For Menon this algorithmic logic, carried over from his digital practice to his paintings, structures the meditative discipline of his abstraction and creates room to play.

As I wander through his studio, I sense what might have been the same pulse Whitten chased decades earlier. A search for something larger than themselves, something that exists in a shared, almost collective consciousness despite being worlds apart. “I am a conduit for the spirit,” Whitten once declared. “It flows through me and manifests in the materiality of paint.” Menon? Maybe he’s tapping into the same spirit — just with a ruler in one hand, a 3D printer in the other and a slightly newer set of tools.