Tarmac #55
They read like satellite paintings: aerial cartographies turned into abstract compositions. The geometry of aviation infrastructure, with its taxiways, markings, and shadows, forms a kind of modern calligraphy written across the ground. Concrete becomes brushstroke. Lines meant to command safety become gestures of beauty.
Airports are spaces where uncertainty is engineered out. Every line, symbol, and color field exists to direct motion, to convert risk into routine. Design becomes procedure; geometry becomes law. Yet in Michael Neff’s Tarmac, that law starts to bend. The visual language of certainty begins to slur. Taxiways curl into impossible loops. Systems built to guarantee safety start to improvise, as if the algorithm itself were questioning the rules it was trained to follow.
These are life-saving lines, marks meant to keep catastrophe at bay, and yet here they waver. They seem to ask what happens when certainty fractures, when the structures built to protect us start to draw outside their boundaries.
Tarmac invites the viewer to see the airport not as infrastructure but as ideology, a site where order is absolute yet always on the verge of unraveling. Lines of obedience turn lyrical. Order becomes art.
A world of lines trying to keep us safe, and the beautiful, unsettling truth that even they can lose their way.
