Analogued-Digitalism
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American graffiti artist Matt W. Moore (MWM) is currently having his first Paris solo exhibition – CRYSTALS & LASERS at SINCE.upian gallery after collaborating with tons of high profile clients such as Adidas, Citroen, Diesel, Nike, Microsoft Zune and many more. Unlike some angry graffiti artists out there, his paintings bring loads of joys and surprises. Inspired by math, architecture, optical illusions, and texture, his “vectorfunk” style is colourful, vibrant, dynamic, asymmetrical with clean-cut geometries yet shines like a piece of Victoria-Cut jewel. However, the precise vectorized-like paintings are all spray-painted and carried out in an analogue way thoroughly even though they look almost architectural and structural.
His current Paris exhibition showcases the artworks that being inspired by French culture, urban fabric, architecture and fashion of Paris during his one month stay in the City of Lights, which you can catch some glimpses of inspiration from his iPhone’s photos. Paris was being illustrated in a such a surreal way by vectorizing WMW’s French experience with intuitively constructed geometries and colors. And of course, in the spirit of graffiti MWM spray-painted on a Parisian wall to mark his colonization with his distinctive style (with the help of tapes of course) like drawing shapes in computer. The outcome does not only create an illusion in term of scales, but also confusion between analogue and digital, 2D and 3D.
Two hours by train from Paris, Lyon-based French Art Director – Lenancker Romain seems to be liaising MWM‘s style with paper and his hyper-sur-real artistic direction. The Puzzle Game project commissioned by Amusement magazine was made with paper sculptures and being staged and photographed in such a way that they look almost 2-dimensional and digital.
These two artists probably don’t really know each other, but one thing for sure is Romain shares the common interest with MWM as all the projects are completely constructed in an analogue way, too. It is his brilliant art direction that makes the sculptures appear to be badly rendered computer graphics, a step down from real material to vector world.
By staging his paper sculptures on-site or mixing up with some products, the juxtaposed effects are even more outstanding, with a good sense of French humor. Again, none of the pictures are CGI, and they work like MWM version 2.0, exaggerated the confusion between lines and form, real and fake, concrete and plastic.Floating objects in between the paper sculptures make the project pretty much like a collage work, blurring the visual and spatial cognition.
In Netherlands, the young electronic band – Nobody Beats The Drum latest’s stop motion animation “Grindin” directed by Rogier van der Zwaag has almost vanished the boundaries in material world visually. At one glance no one could ever tell that is a video made of thousands of photos of sprayed-painted wood blocks. It is bizarre that the editing was perfected to dematerialize the wood blocks while the electro-beats fused in. And it is more bizarre that Rogier van der Zwaag decided to pain-stackingly work in such a low-tech and backward way to create this cyber-realistic video. You can feel the pain by watching the making of.
