April 11th - May 24th
Curated by Ruba Al-Sweel
Siddiq Projects, Hamburg, Germany
Participating artists: Dayana Matasheva & Edson Niebla, Deanna Havas, John Desousa and Tasneem Sarkez
Exhibition text:
POOR IMAGES presents works on canvas and moving image to question ideas around the evolution of painting as a medium historically tasked with recording reality--from painting to photography to cinema and now AI, the way this art form has evolved to free the image from the onus of reality has opened it up to icondules and iconoclasts alike, the exiled poets and peddlers, the witches, the diabolical, and the anathemic at the edge of the settlement, all in defence of the poor image.
Today this question of the ontological identity of model and image hardly subsided–ever advanced imaging technologies are met with increased deviation from the picture perfect. Text-to-image generative AI is undergoing “model collapse” due to a recursive process in which models are training on content generated by earlier versions of themselves, losing the ability to accurately represent the world, and giving rise to an inbred mutant with exaggerated, grotesque features.
Before the AI Slop of melting faces and extra fingers, this primordial hallucinatory chaos was found in the works of painters like Hieronymus Bosch of the Early Netherlandish School. A phantasmagoria beyond meaning which places art in the realm of the nonhuman, it employs a type of communication closer to quantum phenomena, or dreams or the unintelligible speech of angels, even.
Paintings are a slice of life, emphasized. A moment and a mood isolated, slowed and reverbed. The canvas floats like clouds in a hypnagogic state. The hand moves through time and space, analog imprints of the heart’s activity. From one swath to the other, a fleeting synthesis. In this instant, the painter - an artisan in trance - applies a pan and scan film editing technique, cropping parts of the original scene to heighten the composition's most potent aspects. A feeling, reified. A sound, evoked. An image, in movement. A new mix of temporalities frozen.
Photgraphy by Altay Tuz