Photoshop with Real Brushes: The Paintings of Miltos Manetas
"Societies do not disappear easily; people defend their style and way
of life. But art, like a female guest, gets tired after a while and changes
tables. When she leaves a group of people, she takes back her gifts: radical
taste, the spirit of invention, pretty girls and young boys, and in the end...the
spectre of power and authority."
--Miltos Manetas
Miltos Manetas purchased
his first laptop computer not because he wanted to send e-mails, edit images,
or build spreadsheets, but because he thought it was cool that this object produced
light from inside; like an expensive, luminous clam.
Manetas is the digital artist responsible for whitneybiennial.com,
neen.org, iamgonnacopy.com,
and other website-as-art-object one-offs. He's also an accomplished
analog artist--his array of work includes paintings and works on paper. I visited
his painting studios in NYC this week with Coco Conn and a few other friends.
Photos from our visit are here.
Manetas is one to watch: his works on canvas are uniformly powerful, and embody a stark, innovative aesthetic
on technology and human identity. They range from sensuous still-lifes of PC
cables strewn on the floor, to massive Powerbook portraits that occupy entire
6' x 8' canvasses, to brooding studies of Super Mario reclining alone, un-played-with,
beneath a digital tree. Two sets of Playstation joysticks become the Madonna
and Child.
The self-taught painter and former video/performance artist decided to learn
the medium in the mid-90s. "I called my friends and said, how do you paint?
'You get one big brush, and one small brush for details.' So I started painting,"
he told me. "I use oil paints because of all paint mediums, they're most
like computers: they allow for transparency and rewrites."
In his work, human figures appear as incidental, incomplete, unfulfilled elements
in an environment owned by technology. The parallel cables are all talking to
one another, the powerbooks are humming, the modem and the server are negotiating,
chattering, flirting. "Are you sure you want to quit," the laptop
asks? When you enter this powerfully immersive, visionary realm, the answer will be
"no." Visit his web site, then view some of his recent paintings here,
but realize that thumbnails don't do the work justice.
Photos: Xeni Jardin
posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:43:58 AM | permalink
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