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31/5/2007

Della Pittura Digitalis

Caprice Horn Gallery, Berlin

Group show

curated by Paco Barragan

"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. It is useless to draw the bow, unless you have a target to aim to arrow at." Leon Battista Alberti.

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- …Digitalis contextualizes painting in our actual moment.

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".

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 euro 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.
[**The Blood Must Keep Flowing]

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”.

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 of the image has altered dramatically.

Image: Rookie Hugo Alonso

Opening 1 June 2007, 7 p.m.

Gallery Caprice Horn
Kochstr. 60, level 4 - Berlin
Free admission

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