The Physical Matter of a Delusion
My first
experience with the Internet was in the early 1990s. I remember
that I
used to wait until everyone was asleep to turn on the monitor and
go to the web.
Considering the lack of technological development in Chile, my
means to instant
gratification was agonizingly sluggish – Bit by bit, line by line,
the images loaded –
like a virtual snail exposing the naked bodies with its
trace.
20 years later, the vestiges of that bluish-lit screen have become
the Plato’s
Cave of
my reality. As the prisoner inside the cave who thinks the shadows
are the actual
beings and the echoes are the actual voices, I examine the online
imagery as being
the shadows and echoes of the real world – an illusion suggesting a
staged fantasy.
My paintings explore the reality of this stage, by trying to
capture the physicality of
that virtual image. A delusion indeed, yet a self-awareness of a
condition – a
realization of what I thought to be true is no longer. It is this
consciousness that
fuels the desire to create from it the visceral physicality that I
feel the image on the
screen doesn’t possess.
Painting for me has always been the innate medium to simulate
reality. However,
no matter how realistic the painting was, I could go up-close and
the shapes will
break apart into patches of color and texture. My recent body of
work Virtual
Slime,
deals with the exploration of recreating the illusion of a reality
that shatters the
closer you get. From a distance the paintings depict
gender-ambiguous characters
merging onto one another contrasted by the architectural design of
the stage they
reside. But up-close they fracture into saturated slabs referencing
the pixel-esque
nature from which the image came from.
I am trying to make sense of painting in this digital age, by
taking the digital image
of staged events out of its virtuality and transmuting it onto a
physical medium
used throughout history to simulate a reality. I am exploring how
to compensate for
the trace left by the artificiality of the digital scene,
manifesting into visceral paint
the viscosity that the digital image lacks. And to create an
analogy of painting for
what my brain goes through as it creates a reality that is not
there.