"When Mernet Larsen was in her 70s, theproject she had been working on her entire life met a moment. It was the 2010s, and painters everywhere were grappling with how the digital realm affected what we see. People seeing Larsen's paintings for the first time often assumed that they were made using a computer, reading her signature blocky figures as robotic or pixelated-something a machine would create. But they are not computational at all."
"In a world newly dominated by screens, flattening began to exceed painterly problems and pervade everyday life. Larsen, now 86, is amused by interpretations of her figures as robots or avatars, describing herself as a "Luddite." If her paintings, with their flat colors and tessellated shapes, look digital, it's because the computer is an extension of much earlier attempts to flatten and order the world onto a grid."
Mernet Larsen developed a visual practice that investigates the logic and limits of perspectival space and the systems humans use to translate three-dimensional spaces onto two-dimensional surfaces. Her blocky, tessellated figures and flat colors often prompt viewers to assume digital production, but her methods are painterly and rooted in decades of study beginning in the 1960s. She began probing perspective while a college student at the University of Florida, drawing ordinary subjects and later models, and maintained a fifty-year exploration of flattening as it increasingly mirrored screen-dominated visual culture.
Read at ARTnews.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]