En Plein Air. Quayola.

About

Quayola’s practice often engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper.

Landscape painting has been closely associated with technological innovation since its inception. In his solo exhibition en plein air, Quayola explores the way in which human perception has mutated viewing natural landscapes due to advancing technology. Using innovative technological apparatuses to pursue a methodical observation of natural patterns in contemporary natural landscapes, the artist illuminates connections between the senses, memory, and the visual stimuli of technology. The ensuing digital paintings – which draw upon the heritage of Impressionist paintings – merge the experience of painterly avant-gardes and the enduring interest in technological innovation. Fascination with machines has led Quayola to marshal the most advanced technologies to explore new aesthetics in landscape representation. “Pointillisme” deploys LiDAR, a 3D scanning system that maps the environment through high-precision laser. As the art historian Camilla Pietrabissa notes, “Quayola’s landscapes are rooted in the experience of place; they may verge towards abstraction, but they never fully renounce form. The trees, flowers, and plants depicted in his landscapes remain suspended between the original physicality of the world and the possible solutions offered by technologies. Machine vision appears as little more than a pretext to probe human vision, assessing its power to discriminate amidst the contemporary media chaos.”