What are we speaking about, usually, once we check with “the aesthetics of the electronic”? Social media, after all—particularly Instagram, that deep trough of modern visible tradition—but in addition e-commerce, porn, photograph manipulation and graphics programmes, video video games, CGI and, to a lesser extent, digital fact and augmented fact.
What binds those disparate issues in combination, if no longer the attainment (or, somewhat, the semblance of attainment) of our more than a few atavistic wants? They fulfill our appetites and libidos, our want no longer best to peer however to own, to engage with and to breed items or pictures hitherto past our achieve. Virtual aesthetics are the aesthetics of thirst and intake.
The London-based painter Oli Epp has described his paintings as “post-digital Pop,” a time period that recognizes his debt to artists of the Fifties and ’60s who appropriated pop culture. The time period additionally suggests on the other hand, with that qualifying “post-”, a essential stance at the conventional dynamics of modern electronic media. Epp attracts deeply from imagery sourced on-line, replicating the bright, plastic luminosity of graphics and pictures already extremely keyed to attraction to the idly scrolling viewer. Like excellent ads, his photos forestall us in our tracks, which is what they’re designed to do. In contrast to maximum advertisements, on the other hand, they’re normally someway troubling, or corrupted. They’re each stunningly stunning and gruesome; highest and unsuitable; interesting and repulsive.
For his exhibition 9 Lives, Epp brings in combination 9 works of cats, animals he has depicted up to now (and perennial topics of viral movies). His name recognizes, after all, the parable that cats are living a couple of lives (successive, probably, no longer simultaneous)—a legend almost definitely born from cats’ talent to land safely even after flying or falling from really extensive heights.
Epp’s art work all the time land, too, in spite of the contortions he places them thru. In a single portray, titled 3 Needs, a furious-looking black cat seems threaded within a byzantine rope scratching put up, looping and arcing like a sculpture through Noguchi or Calder. In Argos, a wizened black cat (the similar cat, probably, in a distinct lifestyles) has its face bejewelled with crimson, amber and inexperienced eyes, like some malfunctioning pussycat site visitors mild. In but some other portray, titled Castrator, a viciously snarling cat lifts his leg and transforms himself into an enormous Swiss military knife, as though considering the removing of his personal red and horribly humanoid testicles.
All over Epp’s paintings, we witness a planned specific confusion between the human, the animal, and the inanimate. Items morph into figures, and figures turn into items. Animals constitute other people, and other people behave like animals. Epp continuously describes his art work relating to hybridity, as though he’s breeding uncommon new species of quasi-organic beings, or grafting ears onto the backs of mice. He advised me excitedly of an Australian songbird known as the very good lyrebird that has been documented imitating human sounds similar to automobile alarms, chainsaws and SLR digital camera shutters.
However Epp’s scrambling of pre-existing paperwork and classes is ready extra than simply remixing for Surrealism’s sake. It touches on one thing on the very core of artmaking, because it has existed for millennia. To imbue an inanimate, home made object with the facility and company of a residing being (or perhaps a supernatural being) is to grant lifestyles to lifeless topic. Artists’ causes for doing this have, traditionally, been wildly more than a few, from self-protection to deity worship to virtuosic showmanship to unvarnished trade. Liveliness may also be conjured thru mimesis, but it surely is available in different guises too, from the uncanny to the totemic or the vividly expressionistic. Epp, at more than a few instances, has deployed these kind of methods in his art work, particularly photorealist illusionism.
Epp admits to a tortured dating together with his exactly honed art work. Around the arc of his nonetheless brief profession, one will get the sense of him striving against a degree of perfection this is promised, even though by no means really delivered, through electronic tradition. Possibly it could’t be delivered through portray, both, even though if one considers the diversities between those media, between the seductive even though in the long run disappointing high quality of the pixelated, backlit and ephemeral display symbol and the unruly, messy however in the long run natural materiality of paint, it kind of feels {that a} portray has a proper integrity—and a long-lasting sense of aliveness—{that a} electronic symbol does no longer. Epp’s artwork satisfies in some way that his manifold resources by no means can. —Jonathan Griffin