Artist: Enrique Radigales
Exhibition title: PINTURA P1N7UR4
Venue: The Goma, Madrid, Spain
Date: January 15 – March 7, 2015
Photography: Courtesy of The Goma
One can imagine a dystopia where the digital promise of the early 2000s, aseptic and associated with a flourishing new economy, has degenerated into a monstrous Big Data expanding like an oil slick that ends up coating all our habits and customs. It is like a Trojan horse that has wormed its way into our lives, modifying our form of working and way of interrelating with one another with new rules and protocols. A world shaped by technology has been set in place, one that tends to develop according to its own principles and laws, which are paradoxically very different from those of the human being. While Nature in general tends towards balance, technology is disruptive in terms of size and speed.
The exhibition PINTURA P1N7UR4 revolves around a series of fragments offering a vision of a harsh and paranoid future, where the accelerated ruins of omnipresent technology are shown as bright colours of archaic statues, those korai and kouroi eroded by pixels of sand and time. In this way the painting on vinyl “Fragmento y nostalgia” [Fragment and Nostalgia], the digital image has been unearthed from hard disks using data recovery software. These fragments are the ghosts of an old digital archive, returned to our world through ink injection and then intervened in.
One could now envision a utopia where a new post- digital-native generation is reconciling itself with technology: a guerrilla group that has resisted this profound transformation and global homogenisation, instead taking the road of voluntary simplicity and discretional austerity. These human beings have taken control over their social production in real time, striking a balance between technology and time, maintaining their equilibrium through digital fasting and abstinence in data transmission.
