A square composition from Charles Csuri’s Ordo series, in which yellow, orange and magenta ribbons open into a luminous, wing-like form against black. The image was made in 2017 and issued as an Ethereum NFT (token ID 1) in 2026.
Provenance
Issued in 2026 as ERC-721 token 1 in the Ordo contract on Ethereum, through Verse and Solos in collaboration with the Charles Csuri Estate. The image is dated 2017 in the release metadata; the token’s issue year is not its creation date.
Against a black ground, ribbons of yellow, orange, coral and magenta spread into a broad, wing-like form. The composition approaches bilateral symmetry without repeating itself exactly: openings, crossings and shifts in color give each side a different fiery rhythm. It can suggest wings, petals or a luminous canopy. It is also reminiscent of early 1950s color CRT oscilloscope art.
6Korder199_0002SQ belongs to Ordo, a series of 276 images that dates to 2017, produced from files on Csuri’s personal computer. The release describes a process combining his Ribbon tool with Color Mix: one shapes the spatial paths, while the other varies their colors. Csuri set the parameters and selected the resulting images, making judgment and response to chance part of the work’s construction.
The ribbons extend a much longer investigation into drawing in three dimensions. Beyond Boundaries (2006, p. 87) traces the tool to Csuri’s collaboration with Steve May in the early 1990s and connects its development to his interest in Utamaro. The catalogue places such custom procedures within an artistic practice that joined programming with the concerns of painting: line, color, surface and spatial depth.
In her 2026 essay on Ordo, Catherine Mason relates these late compositions to Csuri’s training as a painter and his study of Cézanne. Her account emphasizes iteration: a set of rules becomes a means of exploring multiple visual possibilities. Seen alongside the earlier plotter works in the collection, this image shows how Csuri’s treatment of line expanded into a richly colored, sculptural space.
The title preserves the file-based name recorded in the token metadata. The same composition appeared as Ordo #63 in the estate’s pre-release directory, under 6Korder199_0002SQ.jpg. That directory number is distinct from its blockchain token ID, number 1.