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Email PagePixel Perfect: An Exhibition of Digital Fine Art
May 10, 2006- May 30, 2006
Reception: May 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Pablo Camilo Vergara, Edith Suchodrew, Adi Rizansky Nir, Ben Boutin, Marco Mark, Carmit Haller, Leon Kipping
Agora Gallery
530 W 25th StSix Digital Artists Dazzle in Chelsea Group Show By Maurice Taplinger
Pixel Perfect: “The Digital Art Exhibition” at Agora Gallery has become an important periodic barometer of trends in state of the art image making, as evidenced by the latest installment in the series in the gallery’s Chelsea space, 530 West 25th Street, from May 10 through 30. (Reception: May 11, from 6 to 8 PM.) Mexican artist Pablo Camilo Vergara chooses themes that enable him to indulge a fondness for contrasts between the numinous and the shadowy in his inkjet prints on canvas. His chromatic skill and penchant for dramatic symbolism are especially striking in “Wandering Angel,” in which the subject, seen in close-up within a nocturnal forest partly illuminated by her aura, has a decidedly earthly beauty. Conversely, “Arcane Angel” is a somewhat more ethereal vision, with the figure enveloped by radiant swirls. Edith Suchodrew, an artist born and trained in Latvia, who has lived in Germany since 1991, brings wide-ranging experience in oil painting and other traditional mediums to bear in digital C-prints bursting with baroque forms and blazing with brilliant colors. One can only describe Suchodrew’s compositions as visionary, given their synthesis of abstraction and figurative elements, suggesting some alternate reality or higher consciousness in which the effects of light and color are considerably heightened. By contrast, Adi Rizansky Nir, an artist living and working in Israel, finds inspiration for her inkjet prints on canvas enhanced by painting in scientific sources. Microscopic images of molecular cell culture are blown up to easel scale and employed as stepping-stones to abstraction in Nir’s compositions, informed by her study of biology and Masters Degree in Science. Nir calls her work “a case of art imitating life in the most literal of senses.” Yet her prints go far beyond the literal interpretation of scientific phenomena, becoming abstract evocations with a metaphysical dimension that transcends even the most advanced reaches of science. The conceptually witty French artist Ben Boutin likes to insert himself into his digital prints, becoming an actor in dramas of his own devising, such as one in which he presides over a contemporary Last Supper. Especially piquant is “Ben Boutin Giving a Piece of Advice Regarding the War,” in which the artist appears between George Bush and Tony Blair wearing a t-shirt that says, “Jesus is Coming.” Even more germane than the artist’s incongruous presence is his dressed-down appearance and insouciant expression. He casts his deadpan gaze on Blair as though noticing dandruff on his shoulder. Another bright visual wit, New York artist Marco Mark puts a new spin on Pop in digital etchings on photograph paper with self-explanatory titles such as “Britney in a Campbell Soup Can Headdress” and “Warhol Factory.” Framing fragmented icons of high and low culture within geometric compositions and strident hues, like Warhol himself, Mark applies his commercial experience as a former art director in a fine art context, creating images as effortlessly persuasive as a well-oiled ad campaign. By digitally altering photographs taken from around the world, Israeli-artist Carmit Haller creates collages of color and shape the equivalent of visual free verse. The result is a graceful and poetic arrangement of brilliantly colored abstractions. With no deliberate message or meaning she seeks to engage the spectator visually, delivering him or her to a purely aesthetic experience. She accomplishes this in the individual composition of each canvas as well as in their relation to one another. Alone, her canvases inspire. Together, they awe the viewer and transport them to the kaleidoscopic world she has created.
As founder of a successful ad agency in the Netherlands, Leon Kipping is another artist with commercial expertise. However, Kipping prefers to separate his fine art from his professional experience, creating images digitally, transferring them to canvas, and painting over them with acrylic. The resulting compositions are primarily abstract explorations of form, color, and texture that often allude to landscape or floral imagery but engage us most immediately with their sheer formal beauty.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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