For the sixth edition of
das - experimental art dialogues, and for the first time at CUBO in Torre Unipol, Davide Quayola returns to represent the vision of the Unipol Group's corporate museum. He presents "Storms", a series of prints that elaborates on his research into the landscape painting tradition, exploring its pictorial substance through advanced technologies and recalling William Turner's famous canvases.
Storms consists of a series of
ultra-high definition digital paintings and videos filmed on the Cornish coast that contemplate and redefine storms as natural, physical and emotional phenomena. Quayola acquires data from real-life footage and then reworks it through a game-engine process. Using custom software and algorithms for image analysis and data manipulation, Quayola's work dissolves, disrupts and transcends the description of the landscape to give back a representation that veers towards abstraction.
"
Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight."
(J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972)Immersed in a site-specific installation that radically renews the exhibition spaces and emphasises the perceptive relationship between Davide Quayola's hypermedia landscapes, natural light and the scenic views from the 25th floor, the visitor is invited to partake in a unique and sublime aesthetic experience at the top of the Unipol Tower, echoing that of Turner and the Romantic painters: 'a kind of magic, resulting from the relationship between man, nature, art and technology.' (F. Patti, Quayola - Pleasant places for CUBO Unipol, critical text, 2017)
Like Turner's storms, the works in the
Storms series question the meaning of the sublime. For Quayola, like the great painters of the past, nature is a universal space to be explored to understand reality.
A recognised artist on the contemporary international scene,
Quayola uses technology as a lens to explore the tensions and balances between seemingly opposing forces: real and artificial, figurative and abstract, ancient and contemporary. His poetics question the hierarchies between the human, the natural and the technological and explores new aesthetics and algorithmic visions generated by working with technological apparatuses that observe and encode the world. By pushing computer vision, robotics, generative software and data visualisation towards innovative aesthetic strategies, Quayola appeals to different audiences: from modernists to digital natives.
