De Generation of Painting

"De Generation": degeneration, change, mutation, as well as generation as creation, reproduction, origination. These are the various codes of etymology, vocabulary and phonic perception that inform the title of this investigation of painting. Born in the late 70s through the early 90s, the exhibition’s artists avail themselves of unprecedented access to diverse media. In turn, they give rise to an expanded typology of making, adopting expressive means which lead them beyond the borders of language and its related ability to fix deterministic disciplinary conceits.
Hybridizing sculpture and painting, objects and performances, sound and video, they variously emphasize and dissolve the terms of contemporary painting. Host to an expansive selection of these new vocabularies, the exhibition as a whole underlines a broadening painterly engagement with the fluid means by which today’s visual culture at once dilates and distends historical models of artistic discourse, production, and distribution.
De Generation of Painting devotes itself to visibilizing the works of artists active across a variety of networks and media. Together, they work with and upon new tools of communication, testing formal and conceptual intensities that dually extract from and displace codified processes of image handling. Staking online and offline social networks as objects, subjects, logics, audiences and functions of art, the exhibition celebrates the rapid dissolve of distinctions between virtual and physical toolsets. As such, it points towards the agency of artists in reframing contemporary discussions and concepts of materiality.
As the general conditions of semiocapitalism, networked culture, austerity, and digital nativism consolidate the proliferative abstraction of economic, subjective, and formal being, a fatalistic outlook would regard the shaping of artistic concepts through established models of painting as irremediably foreclosed. Yet, although the transposition of painting from the space of its eponymous material into alternative forms is by now a constant, painting without a brush is far from a repudiation of origins.
As long as art continues to serve a function in the approximation of real and imagined pasts, presents, and futures, we remain far from painting’s prognosticated degeneration. Rather, a regeneration of painting witnesses a seismic reformulation of the terms of a medium, which now competes with an unprecedented number of forms in the visibilization of information, networks, and speculated realities. At the same time it makes way for the crystallization of a virtual – occasionally skeuomorphic – relationship to the reanimation of antecedent artistic means. In short,while the digital palette may be lighter than air, it will forever carry the weight of its allusive associations.
Endlessly mutile, continually reimagined by unforeseeable combinations of materials, technologies, attitudes, and virtual and analogue procedures, painting may be reaching the limits of invention. New expressive means, surfaces, materials, techniques, and objects are invoked, induced, and incorporated. The obsession of reporting news to an already saturated sensibility and devotions to the dogma of originality, will never end.
What painting has absorbed leaves a long moraine in the idea of time: the time of production, chronology of execution, time of commercialization and consumption. Invention, after all, and as any other event that traces time, does not have a duration.

List of artist:
Alfredo Aceto, Keith Allan, Andy Boot, Peppi Bottrop, Isaac Brest, Matteo Callegari, Graham Collins, Julian Charriere, Gabriele De Santis, Ryan Estep, Ditte Gantriis, Mike Goldby , May Hands, Dean Levin, Sam Lipp, Tillman Kaiser, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, Andrea Kvas, Petrit Halilaj, Vlatka Horvat, Jason Matthew Lee, Hugo Mc Cloud, Sam Moyer, Antoine Puisais, Carlos Reyes, Vanessa Safavi, Erik Saglia, Olve Sande, Brad Troeml, Amalia Ulman, Margaret Weber.

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