le Berthélaine

Pixels and Patches

The art exhibition »Pixels and Patches« grapples with the legitimacy and status of traditional painting in a digital age. In the era of the digital age, it seems natural – indeed, even imperative – to question the status and legitimacy of traditional painting: can the artist of today meaningfully mix pigments and spread them across a stretched canvas? It has been done before, in days gone by

The »Pixels and Patches« works are accompanied by the art-philosophical essay »The Art of Painting in the Era of the Digital Age«, which explores the terrain between the virtual image and the traditional physical painting – anno post-MM. Has the painted image become merely an antique, a relic, or an artefact in the archives of art history? – Will the painted work of art henceforth hold only historical interest in the development of art and its unceasing emancipation from its origins? … No, the physical painting can and will!

Since the cave-dawning of Cro-Magnon times, humanity has painted and adorned with pigments – in a continuous renewal, crystallising the spirit and technique of each age. »Pixels and Patches« is this continued challenge. Fear not the pixel, says le Berthélaine!

The catalogue consists of twenty landscape tableaux, rendering the most intense and expressionistic colours of the Danish landscapes, such as root-tangled heather hills, orange-streaked dawns, opium-red poppy fields, cornflower-blue-bursting wheat fields, winter-hardened hillsides and dark green-black background forests – in a philosophical and aesthetic confrontation with the foreseeable artistic atomic unit of the present and future: the pixel. Click the links and savour the pixelation process.

Pixels and Patches #20, »Abstractions: On earth and autumn« https://youtu.be/LwJfozI8znM

Pixels and Patches #19, »Stalker - Challenge of a cliché motif!« https://youtu.be/w02_sY-gZ5Q

Pixels and Patches #17, »Nocturne: Luna al larghissimo« https://youtu.be/ynSPZg00tBQ