Galerie Droste presents an exhibition of two artists, Raphael Brunk and Arno Beck, brought together here for their proximity to digital art. For this autumn exhibition, a sort of artistic chiasmus takes place, as well as a slight break with the gallery's figurative line: while Brunk, who comes from a more digital art background, strives to return to the pictorial gesture, Beck uses more than classical techniques to give the illusion of the virtual.
For Digital Naiv, a deftly humble title, both offer here two new series, the result of reflections taken to a higher plastic level. Brunk is ostentatiously interested in more direct interaction with his canvas, and in the strength of the visible, human component. Based on an image generated by an artificial intelligence with chosen words, he reworks, resculpts and redefines the virtual space before printing it out and finally confronting it with materiality, enabling a meeting of coincidence and the intuitive creative process of painting. As for Beck, his Technofossils series invites us to immerse ourselves in a certain visual ambiguity: he draws inspiration from visions and digital tools to create purely manual paintings. It's a kind of trompe-l'œil, in which the painter plays with textural effects and leaves room for the unexpected to evoke a world of familiar software, yet without intervening in the making of the image.
The two artists use new technologies with the contradictory but no less sensible aim of bringing them closer to the human hand, to maintain a link, a contact, and to envisage a continuation of the upheavals they create in our lives. Together, they reflect on the contribution of the manual to programmed digital technology, which some would like to see evolve towards perfection. In response, the contribution and beautiful discontinuous perfectibility of the hand rebalance our questions.
Arno Beck (*1985, DE) lives and works in Bonn, Germany. He studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and graduated as a master student of Eberhard Havekost.
Raphael Brunk (*1987, DE) lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, as a master student of Andreas Gursky.
