Pointillisme

Pointillism and Impressionism arise from the same need: to capture landscape through the rendering of light. Yet, the Pointillist painter approached nature with a scientific attitude, equipped with the new theories of optical perception. Fascination with the machine has led Quayola to marshal the most advanced technologies to explore new aesthetics in landscape representation. Pointillisme deploys LiDAR, a 3D scanning system that maps the environment through high- precision lasers, thus delivering the utmost technical reproduction of nature. Yet, the machine can make errors and misinterpret certain areas of the landscape, which turn out to be imperfect.

Evolutionary theories state that our species originate from a process made of mistakes and adjustments. The machine proceeds by attempts as well, and Quayola chooses to retain the mistakes as a sign of its peculiar way of reading reality. Today, landscape is no longer what we observe only with our eyes: it is an image arising from the merging of human and non-human gaze. The artist plunges into nature in pursuit of that image: a vision mediated by technology.

In Pointillisme Quayola intervenes by lowering the resolution and removing the sense of perspective, seeking a higher pictorial effect and thus approaching the aesthetics of a Modern nineteenth-century painting. Yet, the final image retains its digital essence, recalling a gaming experience in which landscapes materialize as you move forward. Rather than reading the landscape, we almost sense that the machine is creating it. By exploring nature, man frames his place in the world. Seurat did not want to be called ‘pointillist’: he coined the term ‘chromoluminarism’ to state his role not only as an artist but as a modern man using scientific tools to observe the world. Through collaboration with the machine, Quayola embraces a similar vision, disclosing a discourse on the position of technology in the equation man-machine-nature. Delving into the landscape with an approach somewhere between anthropic and technological sensibility, the machine seems to seek its place in our reality, our evolutionary history and ultimately, in art history.

The modern painter put aside the palette and placed pure colours on canvas - it was no longer his task to mix them: loo- king from a distance, the viewer created a landscape through his eyes. Advancing through the woods, LiDAR returns data that it is up to us to interpret. The machine leaves the artist with the task of reconstructing reality: a collaborative work, resulting in a hybrid aesthetic. Quayola does not use technology to read our reality, but rather to understand the new one created by the machine.

The Pointillists’ technical approach constituted, almost paradoxically, the passage to an abstract and emotional art. In Pointillisme the pictorial effect is activated by the utmost technological process: together with the machine, and renouncing perfection, Quayola paves the way for a new digital aesthetic.

• Lucia Longhi