Gesture

Ry David Bradley has been exploring digital mark making as it relates to the history of painting since the early 2000s. His blog PAINTED, ETC., established in 2009, has been tracking artists “informed by or informing painted practice,” e.g. utilizing technology in new creative processes referencing the painting canon, often incorporating memes, blurring distinctions between photography and paint, and increasingly employing AI. Bradley’s own work explores digitized painted traditions, especially when it comes to brushstroke sampling and painterly tropes of landscapes and portraits, as well as examining the in-betweens of abstraction and representation.

Petra Cortright, who has been called the Monet of the internet, is known for her floral and landscape paintings created by sampling images to create palates and brushstrokes on screen. In parallel, Cortright has been exploiting algorithms for attention since 2007, when she used spam keywords to raise awareness of her video artworks on YouTube. In the past decade, Cortright has found ways to combine video and painting, revealing the layered process of creating a digital painting and all its potential versions.

Miltos Manetas has been bringing together painting and computers since the mid 1990s when he painted a series of closed MacBooks for the seminal exhibition Traffic, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. Following these paintings, technology became the focus of his work. He depicted cables, robots, and SatNavs in oil or acrylic before deciding to create work for the screen inspired by traditional formats instead. As in many of Manetas’ projects, the Floating Studio reinserted technologically influenced physical artworks into digital space, a creative process of claiming new territory.

Sara Ludy is interested in how creative work seen on screen lives beyond it, in spaces imagined or unseen, speaking to a psychological response to the imagery she creates. In the past, Ludy’s works were less about gestures familiar to mark making than about the spatial creation itself, building moving environments or collections of images that referenced uncanny real world realities as seen through screens.

Moon Lake and ekaL nooM explore painterly forms while at once speaking to the nuanced differences and fragility of online environments experimenting with the interpretations of mirroring.

Priscilla Tea’s work since the mid-2000s has been dominated by the creation of minimal, large-format oil paintings on canvas that render digital spaces in human scales. Tea’s paintings are as if avatars see spaces—expansive, abstract, and seemingly without gravity. Like built online environments, horizons are not water or air but gradients of light. In this work, Tea captures an influential scene, a perpetually incoming tide reflecting a non-existent sun and motionless sky; a calm, meditative, forgotten framing of internet creativity mimicking nature.

Rita Vitorelli’s work wanders a fine line between painting and illustration, conjuring traditional motifs with the relaxedness of a doodle. Vitorelli’s work appears to be created in lucid strokes: effortless, expressive marks that often only outline the subject on blank white backgrounds, regardless of canvas, paper or code. Harm van den Dorpel created drawing software so that Vitorelli’s lines become animated in a constantly flowing state, transforming the subjects into a state of flux, emphasizing the performative, eternal gesture of mark making.