Substantifs

NEW PAINTING AND MATERIALITY IN THE SCREEN ENVIRONMENT

This exhibition brings together artists whose works are all extremely physical and tactile in their material approach. Something which simply cannot be experienced or sensed on screen.

Our relationship with the screen and the interface isn’t simply a visual one, it has changed from being a tool that we used at our leisure, to a necessary conduit for social interaction, pavlovian in its schema and invisible in its ubiquity, the screen is the threshold of our dematerialized condition.
 
Painting now takes its place in the world alongside and within this dominant way of seeing, reconfiguring our relationship and understanding to what is ‘real’ and tactile.
 
For many the screen conveys the first encounter with new works of art, often replacing the physical experience entirely. Does this environment create an underlying pressure for artists to make work that is more screenable, quicker to apprehend, less concerned with scale and depth? Or, does it reinvigorate the ‘real’ and the haptic? Can we view work with the same engagement as before, can we still ‘look’ at it in the same way.