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Della
Pittura Digitalis "Let
no one doubt, that the man who does not perfectly understand
what he is attempting to do when painting, will never be a good
painter.
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Conceived for Gallery Caprice Horn, Della Pittura Digitalis Painting and the Digital Momentum may sound at first glance as a diverting contradicitio in terminis. Battista’s influential treatise Della Pittura (On Painting) was the first modern manual for painters. It was circulated as a manuscript until 1540, when it was first printed. But if Della
Pittura … may hint at the referential aspect of painting
– which of course characterizes this reactionary capitalist
painting revival with Saatchi’s The Triumph of Painting and the most recent Turner Prize as clear examples- … It is a little bit disappointing that the number of painters that significantly interact with the Internet and new technologies (I am referring to the visual reality which comes continually to us through these media) are still so few. That’s not to disqualify painting as a medium, but rather the opposite, it suggests its enormous potential. If we accept the idea that the paintings that have stood the test of time, historically are those that reflected on the cultural and social developments of that time, then we would agree that if Velázquez were alive today he would be creating his visions on the computer. The digital syntax calls into question, the pictorial construction of a painting using internet, mass media, as well as digital video, photo cameras, game consoles and programs like Photoshop. These and other technologies allow the artist new means to find, capture, sample and construct images. Which changes the way in which work is traditionally created and viewed. Della Pittura Digitalis Painting and the Digital Momentum displays the work of 6 artists whose pictorial practice expands towards other disciplines. Be it projected painting as in works by Raphael Di Luzio and Saso Stanojkovic; Ariel Hassan’s sculpture; a video still on Dibond by Chus García-Fraile; the bi-dimensional paintings of Vargas Suárez-Universal and Hugo Alonso, or a combination of these, this intermedial approach or “painting between and over the media,” as Javier* Panera, has stated1, “tackles key references of our digital momentum:1) painting in movement 2) the shift of the use by artists of technology as a novelty towards a more social and political use 3) new ways of understanding the debate figuration-abstraction related to high and low resolution of the pixel, and 4) the re-reading of classical genres.” [* Javier Panera (director of the Domus Artium DA2, Salamanca), Paradoxes of painting in the era of the “promiscuous” circulation of images, catalogue III International Expanded Painting Prize Castellón, page 12.] Saso Stanojkovic, Raphael Di Luzio, and Chus García-Fraile propose a series of time-based paintings, in some cases projected onto the wall, in the case of Di Luzio and Stanojkovic or in others presented within the “frame” of a plasma screen like García-Fraile’s. Surprising enough, a painting in real time brings us back to the already forgotten "act of contemplation".
Della
Pittura Digitalis … fundamentally is about what
painting is and can mean in the present moment when the strategies
of pictorial creation as well as the reception |
Saso
Stanojkovic (Macedonia) presents the projected painting
Film Marathon: a 30 min. DVD looped projection of a recorded
painting. The process starts with a photograph found in the
Film Archive in Skopje depicting the film audience in a cinema.
Stanojkovic uses this photograph as the basis for a painting
on canvas. The painting on canvas is then situated among the
seat rows of a real cinema theater where a film is being projected.
Stanojkovic’s work not only deals with the idea of a painting
“watching” a film, but it also relates to a more
social and political use of technology, in this case the absence
of cinemagoers in Skopje due to a flourishing and unregulated
market for pirated VHS and DVDS’s.
Raphael
Di Luzio (USA) creates tranquil images through superimpositions
and successive stratifications of a highly poetic nature. His
projected painting The Fall of the Roses, is a looped
mono-channel DVD of 16 min., screened straight onto the wall,
references the re-reading of classical genres like portraiture,
specifically the works of Velazquez and Whistler. His work results
from his theory of an “eye-in-time” which sees narrative
structures in work that relies on cinematic time-based nonlinear
sequence, montage and superimposition. Differing from what he
calls the “silent-eye” prevalent until early twentieth
century that was conditioned to perceiving content in fixed
images and perspective. His enigmatic portrait is recreated
again and again by form and color reflecting different states
of minds while alluding to a creative interplay of abstraction
and figuration.
Chus
García-Fraile (Spain) also displays a powerful
and expressive interplay between abstraction and figuration
in her painting in movement For Sale I, where we gradually
see, pixel by pixel, how a building is being constructed and
deconstructed again. At its peak, the image of the video coincides
with the frozen image on Dibond next to it. With a Tetris game-like aesthetics García-Fraile shows us how the non-referentiality
of abstraction can be related to the low resolution of the pixilated
image; and the referentiality of representation to high resolution
images. The painting titled 290.000 € as well as For
Sale refers to the actual troubling context in Spain where
real estate speculation is at its height.
For Ariel Hassan (Argentina/Australia) chance and
serendipity are key elements in his interdisciplinary TBMKF**
project where painting expands creatively towards photography
and sculpture. His “fluid paintings” stand for large
scale digital manipulated paintings in florescent colors and
shapes taken from original flow of fluids. After dropping liquids
of paint onto a flat surface a chaotic composition of colors
and shapes emerges. After selecting a small area, Hassan scans
it digitally in the computer and starts to reshape it and saturate
some parts of it. Thus hidden anatomical images appear in a
powerful play between abstraction and figuration where digital
enlargement and flatness suggest a complex non-linear reality.
This pseudo-scientific digitally manipulated reality results
in a careful, slow and intensive hand-painted process.
Science
is also at stake for Vargas Suárez-Universal (Mexico/USA) who over the last three years has been working
on a series of paintings based on mathematical geometries and
relationships between nature and scientific visualization. VSU
chooses to present alternative visual models of quantified information.
His concerns lie within the terrain of unknown forms and the
evolution of visual syntax. Using basic principles of Cellular
Automata (CA), Tree of Life resembles complex abstract
compositions yet is based on how simple rules yield complex
results. It also embodies the combination of organic and inorganic
information while it hints at the idea that painting can represent
the most technologically advanced ideas, images, and messages
using the most straightforward materials.
Rookie Hugo Alonso (Spain) displays a very interdisciplinary
approach as well, where he mixes video, film, photography, digital
images, and painting. Whether the artist downloads images from
the Internet or takes them from films, like Pepin Tune, the
end result lies at first sight somewhere between the pictorial
and the photographic. Once scanned, the image is enlarged and
distorted digitally in order to create a very oniric and hallucinating
world where everything goes. The airbrush technique with which
Alonso finishes the painting gives it a very photographic look.
Alonso makes in his own words “videographic paintings
that allow a sequenced reading”.