Landscape Paintings

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Observation of nature through new technological apparatuses

Taking inspiration from pictorial traditions, Quayola speculates on new forms of landscape painting, reflecting on how technology is rapidly changing the way we observe and perceive the world around us, and ultimately reality itself.

As our collective vision is constantly mediated by digital processes that enhance, filter and distort our perception of reality, the boundaries between real and artificial, physical and digital are blurring. As a reflection of this ever-evolving condition, Quayola draws a parallel with late 19th century landscape painters who explored, observed and represented nature in new ways, discovering new visual languages. Quayola conducts a series of observations of natural landscapes and phenomena with a similar intent, aided however by extensive technological apparatuses and computational strategies, augmenting his human perception and capabilities.

Quayola’s landscape paintings focus on the inherited aesthetics of the processes used to create them, celebrating new forms of algorithmic gesturalities, non-human virtuosity, and ultimately new relationships between man and machine.

The chaotic behavior of waves during a seastorm, vegetation deforming under high-winds, color palettes of spring’s floral formations, shifting seasonal lighting over mountain peaks, and forests’ geometric complexities, all become data-sets driving Quayola’s computational paintings.

Despite the scanner’s incredible precision, the organic geometric complexities of the forest are often beyond its capabilities, therefore a series of artifacts are created. Quayola’s focus resides on these very artifacts, their machine-made yet expressive aesthetics and their new non-human gestural potentials.

These pictorial simulations are generated and calibrated via a custom-developed software, where the captured data-sets drive composition, colors and forces in the paintings.

The result of these meticulous processes materializes as a series of digital prints and video installations, from small intimate objects to large-scale immersive environments.

Quayola’s work ultimately explores the tension and equilibrium between seemingly opposing forces, where our natural world blends harmoniously with new algorithmic logics – simultaneously reflecting on pictorial traditions while fostering new computational aesthetics and speculating new possible creative interactions between man and machine.