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I've been trying to think through this style of painting for half a decade at this point.
see here:
Caroline Bachmann, Emily Mae Smith, Caitlin Keogh, Orion Martin, Sascha Braunig, Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Andre Pierre at Central Fine, Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Josefine Reisch at Noah Klink, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert
Call it, Byzantine icon influenced iPad Tarot painting. Maybe just, iPad Surrealism. Interface Astrology.
"the priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms"
Altarpieces similarity to modern GUI space makes them somehow anachronistically the most relevant from of painting, pre-renaissance painting systems matching those of the mass systems we interface with daily ... supplanting figuration with codes: image as icons broken into frames and grids of information with a skeuomorphic impression of religious wonderment. It is no coincidence that devotional paintings contain the same figurative depth as a iPad screen.
The interface, the organization of symbols to access higher planes.
Organization and display systems become the forms we think in, render the world, Tufte et al. Google images, the iPhone, the interfacization of everything becomes predominant, and children swipe at books. Approach paintings as if they too are systems of information, signs, or, worse, informative.
... tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from jewel to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function. This is art, possibly.
Clue board games. Painting converted to iOS, and graphical icons to redistribute sense. Building interfaces for interpretation ...Art seems doomed to be particularly suggestive tarot cards.
your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules.