Case Study Miltos Manetas

ÑEWPRESSIONISM

We live in days of Metascreen. That’s to say, that screens (not computers) have now become a new layer of Nature. Screens and Networks.  Screens are things that “project”, “transmit”, “translate” but also “concile”, “isolate”, “protect”.

Screens protect from the view of the whole (they are showing just a part, just a bit at a time). Looking at screens, can’t give the whole “impression” and it doesn’t offer the impression of the “Whole. Alas! it can’t transmit the “feeling” of the entire landscape… The feeling of Nature. How easy that feeling rises when it comes to trees, rivers, mountains. One has just to stay still in front of these (like the man in the painting of Caspar David Friedrich) and do nothing but watch!  The essence of the nature of what we call “natural world”, is gratis, it isn’t even interactive, its just there, our in the open, ready for the take!  When it comes to Networks though, things aren’t that direct, exactly because Networks, are for the moment reachable only through computer screens, those unbearable eye-traps, those uninvisible pocket-walls.

Here comes Painting. Here comes Representation to save the day!

In a Metascreen World, representing (through painting, printing techniques, ready-made photography etc.), the infinite locations of the Internet, the many-worlds scenario of videogames, the overwhelming new populations of avatars, is the only way to be looking at Nature “At Large”.

Painting the output of computers, is attempting to “grasp” the feeling of it all: natural AND technologic nature alike.  Finally, it is to try-for yet another time, like those guys in Paris, 150 years ago-to apply a “deeper realism”, something so cutting age that has to look quite light, quite easy and not very conceptual, something “impressionistic”.

Participants:

Mike Calvert

Griffin (invited by Pascal Janovjak)

Annika Larsson

Angelo Plessas

Jon Rafman

Nora Renaud

Priscilla Tea

Amalia Ulman

- And with participation of

Domenico Billari

Alan Bogana