I am an artist with a bias towards inductive process. Through an approach I’ve dubbed ‘post-digital painterly abstraction’, I pursue subtle and sublime (I hope) aspects of contemporary media technology, (the human condition of) cognitive overload and our struggle for transcendence. I use an interplay of multiplicity, clinical abstraction and a kind of conceptual procedural super realism to compose artworks that tease perception and challenges closure.
Much of my art is composed of nearly insane numbers of images/information-sources meticulously digitally superimposed and mathematically averaged into a result that holds or posits more than representation or experience. Usually the results appear to have a painterly quality that emerges from the work’s internal patterns of interference and contradiction. In contrast to superficial ‘filter effects’, often employed in digital illustration techniques, this texture of painterly artefacts becomes an integral aspect of each piece. These elements become a tapestry of myriad choices confronting the viewer. Shapes and patterns become cognitive crossroads, the viewer can’t perceive all the information contained in the artwork, in anything remotely like ordinary perceptual coherence and, perhaps reflecting something of real life, the viewer has to choose what to see. This dynamic is further augmented by the fact that the overloading of the information set space entails a reduction in the discreteness of elements in direct inverse proportion to the scope of information presented.
Or, in simpler terms, these works are well suited to those with high degrees of novelty preference; you are unlikely to see the same in each, or even any encounters with and explorations of the work.
With ‘post-digital painterly abstraction’ I intentionally celebrate contradiction and ambiguity on various levels. For example, stylistically the work contrasts subtle visual qualities reminiscent of Renaissance art such as sfumato, against the clarity and precision ordinarily pursued in digital media. My works often have titles, subtexts and meta-narratives that contradict, or recast the subject matter, with an occasional pinch of sociocultural commentary or a friendly measure of inter-textual irreverence. This approach is informed by the socio-technical systems theory paradigm; a focus on the overlapping interdependence of technical, sociological and environmental subsystems.
When I’m not compulsively pushing pixels late at night, I am the ICT manager for Regenesys, a private institution of management education in Sandton. I am also first and foremost a husband and daddy.