EXHIBITION

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The dawn of the digital age at the turn of the millennium gave rise to a new breed of figurative design. These so-called ‘characters’ were reduced, flat, friendly and free of all narrative, biographical or cultural context, leaving them to function purely in terms of appeal and their ability to trigger empathy and connect with the viewer on an emotional level.

Today, ‘character design’ plays a vital role in our culture of visual overload and global communication. Its almost typographic minimalism and absent corporeality continue to amplify the uncanny feeling of being confronted with strange entities from another world.

Pictoplasma presents a selection of international artists who have transformed their characters from digital to analogue, re-discovering such slow media as bronze, wool, clay, wood, rubber and different methods of drawing and painting. This ‘post-digital’ strategy can be seen as a quest for a state of permanence beyond the fleeting, flickering moment when the digital ‘monsters’ appear on our computer screens. It also links contemporary figurative art to an ancient genealogy quite distinct from our all-surface digital culture: the ritualistic practices, mystic totems and animist masks that have long combined anthropomorphic principles with graphical reduction and abstraction.