Ultra-Modern Oil Paintings Offer Art’s Reply To The Digital Glitch With Broken File Tiling

What were the first artists doing? Were they painting what they saw, exploring the cause and effect dynamic of applying pigment, or trying to communicate something? We’re all built slightly differently so it’s likely that the earliest artists had several motivations between them. What began as a replication of the things encountered on life’s journey and the images conjured up by the mind quickly grew to become the basis of language and mysticism.   
 
As we know, symbols and alphabets work to build a big picture from a small input, the hidden meaning behind a word is extensive, dictionaries have long lists of possible explanations as to what certain words might mean. Symbols extend this beyond formal recognition and exert a more subjective influence on the mental background. Together, language and symbolic images work to produce very real and repeatable experiences that can affect the way people think, feel, and behave.  
 
So, what happens when we begin to paint the things we see outside of nature? It’s not a new phenomenon, artists have been painting clothes, houses, wooden machines and then metal ones, plastics, and now digital. How do these images, symbols, and descriptions of our reality serve to build our internal picture of the world? What kinds of metaphor work well with things made by the human hand? What do they say to us when we examine the painting? 
 
An exhibition by Birmingham-born artist Paul Lemmon is set to run from the 4th to the 14th of February at The Herbert in Coventry, England. It’s called Through The Screen and contains over 40 hand-painted oils that show various degrees of digital glitch. Glitch music has become popular over the years, possibly entering the scene with the dub music phenomenon in which cassette players were pitted against each other in perpetual loops. As media has moved over to digital, the familiar blocky mishmash of data has become the norm as both our TVs and our digital files fail to get the message across from time to time.  
 
Some of his works were made by directly corrupting YouTube videos, in particular famous faces from the pre-internet era.  By painting exactly what he saw, even if was on a screen, the artist still captured the original essence of the form. The conversation between modern and pre-modern has left the days of what was once called Modern Art. In this 21st Century age of digital technology and the democratisation of ideas, for better or worse, our art must begin to speak our own language once again. This is a good start, and like the artist says, “The batteries don’t run out”. 

​Via- BBC