Original Artworks Gallery – Picky art

After a half-hour break, Ken Okiishi, Florian Meisenberg, and Kerstin Brätsch gathered to discuss digital abstraction. Okiishi began by presenting a Frieze project he made in 2013, in which a robot shot paintballs onto a glass surface and canvases when visitors pressed a button. (“I’m particularly allergic to the art-fair context, seeing all the people fucking each other,” he said as he played video documentation of the project.)

Okiishi later explained that his art began with a joke: the grease left behind from fingerprints on screens is actually the result of abstract gestures. Anyone with an iPhone can become Pollock. But then, for Okiishi, it became something more—it became “generative,” as he put it, and he was able to use painting to blur the inside and outside of screens. By painting on top of screens and then filming those painted screens, he was, quite literally, turning digital technology inside out—he was putting gestures that are normally made on top of screens inside them.Like Okiishi, Meisenberg combines analog and digital techniques for his paintings. For a show earlier this year at Simone Subal Gallery, Meisenberg made a 21-foot-long painting that involved squirted-out oil paint, imprints from his buttocks, and memory cards. “My artistic approach derived from painting,” Meisenberg said, “but I’m consistently engaged with the digital sphere.”Meisenberg, who studied painting with Peter Doig, spoke about how technology has inundated us with images, creating what he called a “jet lag of meaning.” In response, a video in that Simone Subal show featured an amorphous digital blob engulfing and regurgitating sculptures, furniture, and other objects.Digital technology’s ability to layer images came up again when Brätsch discussed the relationship of language to painting. Brätsch said she had “abstract anxiety,” and that she wanted, at first, to get away from it. “To shatter [abstraction], I must drop it, so to drop it, I must drop a drop of paint,” she said. This resulted in her digitally designed, geode-like forms, which feature swirling forms that seem to be layered. The point, she said, was to get people talking—to bring up the pile-up of history in these images, which recall Renaissance marble sculptures and cracked computer screens simultaneously. It was, as Brätsch put it, “painting as pot-stirring.”When the panel’s moderator, media theorist Alexander Galloway, asked whether there was anything spiritual in her images, Brätsch paused for a while and thought it over. “It’s just kind of hard to describe that with language,” she concluded.Okiishi was more straightforward: there is no spiritual content to his work. “Maybe it’s just, ‘Oh, I’m working on something,’” he said of his process. Then, realizing that the conversation had veered far away from its original topic, Okiishi said, “I had this impression that we were here to discuss digital painting, and then it became something else.”“I wonder what Oehlen would say,” Brätsch responded.