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See van Gogh's France Become Stunning Digital Abstractions

Quayola's digital paintings 'Pleasant Places' blur the boundaries between representation and reality.
Images courtesy of the artist

UK-based artist Quayola has a series of new digital paintings which will premiere at the Glow Festival, Eindhoven, the Netherlands taking place from November 7 to 14. Called Pleasant Places, it takes inspiration from van Gogh—2015 is a commermorative year for the artist—and the landscape tradition in Dutch art.

The paintings' subject matter is the Provence countryside in the south of France, the same landscape that inspired many of van Gogh's works. As a nod to the painter's expressionist style, Quayola's artworks transist from realism—trees swaying in the wind—to abstraction as the natural forms begin to bleed into one another in swirls of disintegrating pixels. The audio of rustling leaves and wind also becomes distorted and abstracted.

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"Through the misuse of image­ analysis and manipulation algorithms, Pleasant Places challenges the photographic image and proposes alternative modes of vision and synthesis," runs the press release. "Familiar landscapes—filmed in ultra ­high­ definition—is shown with meticulous attention to details and to the anthropomorphic shapes of the trees. Then, through the use of custom­ software, the detailed texture of the foliage is reduced to two­ dimensional masses of volume veering towards abstraction. As the outlines of trees and shrubs get blurred, nature becomes dense and almost impenetrable. The resulting compositions remain, suggestively, suspended between representation and abstraction, between the depth of the natural scenery and the surface of the screen."

The piece will be shown outdoors as a large screen-based installation.

Click here to learn more about Quayola.

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