A while ago I started an experiment to explore the influence of pixelation on Painting. We view the majorit of the art or images we see on a computer or on television, rarely seeing the actual work in person. I decided to reveal the elements that make up all digital images - pixels. I chose to recreate a rare self portrait of Turner as the subject - to draw a lineage beyween the old and new - paint and pixel.
Art, like any information, is consumed.
I began thinking about the place of art in the information era.
CHRISTINA GRAMMATIKOPOULOU explores these idea’s well in her article – Beyond Materiality: A digital revolution in life, art and logos. I let her do the talking….
“Our lives: photos, books, music… memories, personality, are now crammed into a tiny hard disk. They can be multiplied, distorted, enhanced or be forever erased
In a parallel course, the artistic object strays out of museums, art spaces and high-class collections in order to become a desktop image, a saved file, data flowing on the Internet; every user can get it and transform it. Art becomes more accessible than ever.
A computer translates any kind of information into numerical data, saves it and subsequently reconstructs it in an understandable form that reproduces the familiar form of a photo, a video or a printed text.
However, a digital photograph -or a digital video- is very different from an analogical one: it’s not the registration of light onto film, but a synthesis of elements called “pixels”; the pixels correspond to numerical values according to their color and their place in the picture.
In other words, what we have is not a copy or a registration of reality, but a reconstruction of what’s visible “
It is this notion that we see a copy – a constructed illusion – regurgitated through digital trickery. I have recreated the illusion we see online revealing the pixels in paint . Reconstructing the codes the computer tells us is an image
The subject is Turner, in a rare self portrait. There is a dialogue to be explored here between the natural and the digital. Turners landscapes, captured and regurgitated on- screen in miniscule squares. Also, Turners paint is captured digitally and I have captured the digital representation with my own paint, adding a further step to a well known cycle.
Each square was painstankingly mixed and Painted on to a complex grid layout. Each squre is 1cm squared. Final size is 160cm x 122cm.