Gonzalo Páramo Pino

'Just Four Letters'
2003
Mixed media installation
Dimensions 132.5cm x 46cm x 67cm

“…a paragraph of written English…is made of about thirty symbols (the letters and punctuation marks, ignoring capitals). A typical paragraph has about as many letters as a typical protein has amino acids. Thus a similar calculation to the one above would show that the number of different letter-sequences is correspondingly vast.”
Francis Crick, ‘Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature’ (1981).

'Just Four Letters' utilizes a battered four-drawer steel filing cabinet owned by Francis Crick, in which he stored papers relating to his discovery of the structure of DNA. Using his signature materials of oil, hair, encrypted and legible handwritten packets of information in ink on translucent paper, the artist has interpreted the journey of unraveling the secrets of the genetic code.

The Crick archive was purchased by the Wellcome Library in 2001, and his papers were crated and sent in the original filing cabinets from southern California to London. The title of the work relates not only to the four principal scientists involved in the DNA discovery and the four letters that make up the genetic code (G,A,T,C), but to the book 'Just Six Numbers' by Martin J Rees, which explains the significance of six constants that shape the structure of the universe, just as GATC shape the structure of humankind.

GPP