ART CITIES:Berlin-Quayola

Davide Quayola is a visual artist and digital art pioneer from Rome. He explores the complex relationship between form and space, innovation and tradition, and the figurative and the abstract. His practice spans photography, performance, drawing and software programming. Whether moving or still images, Quayola’s works challenge notions of intellectual property and historical value.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: NOME Archive

His exhibition “Iconographies” displays what its title promises, Quayola uses straight lines, surfaces and their tessellations to interpret the images by Botticelli, Rubens, Guercino, Caravaggio. The method of presentation is a bit unexpected though, as the works are shown as prints and aluminum engravings. The exhibition is part of an ongoing project that analyzes Renaissance and Baroque paintings. The artist transforms religious and mythological scenes into complex abstract formations, creating alternative versions of the old masterpieces by removing the paintings from their historical narratives. As writer, artist and academic Daniel Rourke suggests, we are invited to active perception: “Iconographies asks the viewer to slash and sunder, to cut and separate, to hack and cleave, to slit, rive, rip, dissect, and disunite with our wandering eyes and reactivated minds”. The first series of works in the exhibition translates the iconography of “Judith and Holofernes” into anodized prints that depict abstract formations of the symbolic images. The second consists of a unique edition of three Ditone prints that recreates the “Adoration of the Magi” by Botticelli using complex geometrical forms and colors. In “Iconographies #81-20, Adoration after Botticelli”, the artist translates the geometric points used in the previous work into nine variations of code alongside a text from “Vite degli artitsti” by Vasari. Finally, the exhibition also features Iconographies “#16-01, Venus & Adonis after Rubens” which transforms the work of Rubens into a topography of geometric contours.

Info: NOME, Dolziger Straße 31, Berlin, Duration: 15/1-5/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 15:00-19:00, http://nomeproject.com