Artist’s statement -
A kind of painting is presented that is digital in the extreme but which has a strong relationship to painting. This relationship is a technological extension of the painting/photography relationship that characterizes the work of Gerhard Richter.
Modern painting was ‘discovered’ in the enlightenment, at the beginnings of the modern idea of humanism. The relationship between the model of painting and digital technology is analogous to the condition of the human in the context of the information age. Painting may in fact be a model of a human, its stretcher ‘remembers’ a skeleton and the cloth stretched over this ‘remembers’ human skin. The conditions described are those of intervention, disembodiment and memory.
These digital paintings have undergone large amounts of intervention via digital media (the canvases), are disembodied (the video) and are plastic memories of painting (the wall work). They present themselves as analogous to the situation humans find themselves in context of an information or posthuman age. An age which is populated by increasingly intelligent machines and vast databases of information all reminiscent of the human but not conditional upon its condition of subjectivity or uniqueness.
The paintings could also be described as skeuomorphs. A skeuomorph can be defined as a feature that is not functional in itself but refers to a feature that was functional at some time in the past. An example of a skeuomorph is the pattern of stitching on the dashboard of a late model car. The pattern on the injection molded vinyl alludes to stitching but is in no way responsible for holding the dashboard together.
Ephemera
→ Simon Ingram: Painting as Machine, 2004, exhibition card