January 12 to February 11, 2018
106 Forsyth Street, between Grand and Broome streets
New York City, lylesandking.com

Technological singularity—the point at which the velocity of advancement reaches infinity—is, some say, close at hand. The manner in which innovation accelerates, with new discoveries speeding up further progress, is similar, perhaps not coincidentally, to compound interest. Moore’s Law predicted a doubling of circuit transistor density every two years, a trend that—despite pesky limitations like the size of individual atoms—seems accurate for the foreseeable future. The human body, in comparison, naturally advances on an evolutionary timescale, measured by incremental changes over thousands or millions of years. How can humanity compete with this insane pace? Are we doomed to become slaves to our creations as in so many sci-fi dystopias? Rather than seeing this scenario as a conflict between man and machine, these advancements could be thought of as augmenting our humanity, as in transhumanism, or as an indistinguishable addition to the increasingly meaningless category of “the human” as in some lines of posthumanist thought. Chris Dorland’s work, on view at Lyles & King, seems to be in line with this latter interpretation. His Alumacore prints and video works, created using layers of images altered by digital glitches, merge human and digital actions into a single substance is neither one nor the other.

Openness to chance occurrences is hardly new in art: Building on Dada and Surrealist experimentation, Francis Bacon threw handfuls of paint at his canvases to disrupt his existing imagery while John Cage performed on prepared pianos designed to produce random sounds. A glitch isn’t simple randomness, however: it is the intersection and confusion of multiple processes, like a machine misinterpreting data meant for some other use, or a circuit that allows its signal to be altered by outside noise. In whatever way a specific glitch may have been cultivated, it represents the “will” of digital processes altering, if not overpowering, that of the humans who created such systems in the first place. Dorland’s broken and hacked machines are his co-creators, and while the artist ultimately has the final say on how each piece turns out, these decisions are influenced by their non-human digital labor.

Can Dorland’s human touch be visibly distinguished from the digital logic of a machine? Untitled (Overclock) (2017) features a woman’s eyeless face, seemingly lifted from a makeup ad, distorted in a manner indicating that it was moved around while being scanned. This is the only recognizable image in the piece: Everything else is abstract. and while it seems to follow a certain logic (such as the vertical division between fields of red and blue), any larger human meaning is lost in an inscrutable pile of digital artifacts. Untitled (Drone Psychic) (2017) practically forces an abstract reading of its imagery, lacking any clues to the sources of its densely-layered and distorted material. There are several painterly passages in which skeins of acidic color ooze and flow together, but what these “brushstrokes” may actually be must remain a mystery, with any identifying information having been corrupted or deleted in the piece’s creation.

Played on a TV leaning against the wall, Dorland’s video Untitled (memory cortex) (2017) is a montage of glitched imagery in motion. Snippets of occasionally legible text—computer code and Japanese message board comments—float above footage from a first-person shooter video game as its color palette jumps between the red, green, and blue channels of computer graphics output. Any details about the game’s narrative are hidden in a swirling mass of images and text overlaying the already distorted footage.

Dorland’s work can be appreciated as abstraction, but pieces of images hint at deeper processes behind their generation. Untitled (Drift Upload) (2017) has bits of racecars splayed across its surface, disrupted by red blocks and horizontal black lines. A spiderweb of shattered glass, like the cracked screen of a smartphone, breaks the picture’s upper-right corner. Most of the prints feature such fractures, reminders of the broken border between the two worlds we regularly inhabit. The world depicted through Dorland’s work isn’t a cyberpunk dystopia as popularized in sci-fi, but it isn’t the utopia-for-profit envisioned by Silicon Valley “tech bros” either. It is more akin to an atopia, a place without borders or boundaries, like a broken screen trying, and failing, to keep separate the “real” and the “digital.”

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Stephen Maine: Halftone Paintings at 490 Atlantic Gallery
April 5 to May 10, 2014
490 Atlantic Avenue (between Nevins Street and Third Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 344 4856

Surface and the illusion of surface are the heart of the matter in the work of two abstract painters whose recent exhibitions in Brooklyn dangle the mystery of process and the indisputable facticity of material before the viewer. Stephen Maine’s paintings utilize a Luddite methodology that mimics and critiques the patterns of higher-tech dot printing processes while Amalia Piccinini coats her canvases in skeins of dark stains with accretions of paint, forming a self-consciously imperfect and mottled texture. Both artists circumvent typical questions of composition, instead conceptualizing painting as coating, skin or happy coincidence: within these alternative parameters though, they generate a considered reappraisal of recognized tropes.

Piccinini’s approach to paint explicitly invites many interpretations. Unabashedly abstract, they nonetheless invoke the underside of a Tiepolo thunderhead or the hills in the background of an El Greco crucifixion — there is a classicizing painterly style at work here. But her method of applying oil and acrylic paint implies both intentionality and accident, and revels in pushing the viewer into a position of interlocutor with the canvas. Her gloomy, dark pieces are a primer of references to Abstract Expressionism; the entire canon of that period contributes details, but as an artist she is less precious or egocentric and more mischievous. Resembling fireworks fading in a dark sky, Touch (2014) is a light-absorbing darkling canvas — transparent colors drizzle and trickle into nothing, and as they do, the pigment encounters dried bumps on the surface. Though there is the sense that the colors fulfill a careful and valuable role within the artist’s canvas, it is also apparent that they have been added later and are forced to contend with the preexisting lumps, scuffs and scumbles on the surface. Into this milieu Piccinini also adds glazes, creating pools of glittering reflectivity, versus regions of brooding matte black.

Stephen Maine’s Halftone paintings harness that seductive graininess of imperfect technological reproduction. Using a monoprinting or stamping method to apply acrylic to the canvas, he layered veils of dots of various tints and hues over each other and in so doing generates a picture plane that on the one hand insists on some unknown algorithm of order — implicit in the idea of mechanical reproduction is the assumption that there is a tool interface, a disjunction between the hand of the artist and the final work of art, allowing for repetition. Conversely, Maine’s process is purposely flawed in terms of reproducibility; he doesn’t know what the end result will be and therefore the pieces are inevitably unique. The images are titled in numbered series, with a mock scientific rigor, as for example: HP13-0701, HP13-0702, HP13-0704 and HP13-0706 (all 2013). These four are all identical in size (20 x 16 inches) and do resemble each other in color — light blue points over an orange background — but their similarities are like a stop motion sequence of a cloud or billow of smoke. The viewer finds herself uncomfortably situated between the cartoonish deconstruction of the printed image of Lichtenstein or Polke and the indulgence in mechanical process of Warhol’s silkscreens. Within this context Maine’s gorgeous paintings seem like casual studies of entropy, a wily clockmaker winding up a machine to produce sexy mistakes.

HP12-1212 (2012) layers an inconsistent field of black pixels over a pale ochre base. It yields an imaginative graphic cartography that the mind automatically leaps to find some recognizable point of reference for. If we can’t discern the metaphorical value behind the strength of one patch over another, as in a topographical diagram, the patterns of darkness and blind spots in the imprint offer an insight into the primitive and capricious nature of Maine’s process. But it is impossible to tell if the original pattern is identical to its doppelganger, or if something was lost in translation. Along the edge, the background bursts through like a slide melting in a projector, but again the singular idiosyncrasies of the surface belie the fact that though this looks like a copy, it is one with no apparent referent. The familiarity is very confounding. HP11-0402 (2011) is less frustrating, but again for no reason in particular except that the black dots are more material and they lie over a vibrant orange base and approximate a composition with more finality — the devil is in the details.

Piccinini’s pieces are more amorphously formed and much more diffuse in their legibility. Untitled (2013), a horizontal black canvas with eruptions of orange that vary in degrees of saturation — burning brightly, but quickly melting back into the black or floating off in ghostly sheets and billows — perhaps projects a sense of despair and deep, unsettled anger on the part of the artist. Piccinini embraces the proclivities of the media to flow and pool and seeks to erase a sense of hand. She engages in the psychological game of pushing our buttons with color, and though all the works evince a visceral response through the aforementioned art-imitating-nature application of pure abstraction, some, such as the multicolored Touch and Privilege (2014), employ a more stilted and painterly, but more effective approach to luring in the viewer.

The amped up imitation of natural randomness is a favorite pastime of the abstract painter: the hallucinogenic marble passages in Fra Angelico, Hockney’s meditations on ripples in a pool or Alex Hay’s reproductions of wood grain and cracked paint. Both Piccinini and Maine inhabit the interstitial realm of having their paintings appear reminiscent of something, but that resemblance is to the most ambiguous of models: cloudy landscapes and blown-up Xeroxes. In line with their fabrication, the paintings seem imitative of process itself. Various crystalline effulgences appear to well up from Piccinini’s paintings while Maine’s conceit may be time-based: oxidation or the leaching away of a surface.

The post Surface Tension: William Corwin on Amalia Piccinini and Stephen Maine appeared first on artcritical.