Christopher Rodrigues’ work lies between things; photography and painting, hand and computer, past and future. Drawn digitally and printed photographically, what we see is not of our world or time, but nevertheless is believable to us. Even though scale and distance seem compressed, the images have a quality of appearing almost real. The Pendulum Gallery presents recent and new works by Rodrigues in the show Planets / Still Lifes. The exhibition is of 3 parts; digitally constructed flower photographs, a single-channel video, and digitally constructed planet photographs, printed large and postered onto a construction hoarding in the Gallery Atrium.
To create these works, Rodrigues mines the Internet for images from which he borrows pixels of color, using Photoshop to manipulate the pixels in a painterly fashion to generate a library of elements (e.g., trees, flowers, rocks, water, clouds), which he then assembles in a collage-like manner. While his work exploits and utilizes the digital environment for its building blocks, it is rooted within two core traditions of contemporary art, Landscape and Still Life.
Rodrigues’ Planets are a fictional creation, but one that is already familiar to us from satellite and telescopic images of the Cosmos. These images are plausible to us as distant planetary objects, and we are conditioned to accept them as such by our exposure to the incredible photographs of the universe captured by earth and space-based telescopes. But they could also be seen as stages in the long-term evolution of our own Planet, which changes to reflect the natural and man-made systems that dictate its fate.
The Still Lifes are created by arranging flowers from his digital elemental library into bouquets, much like contemporary flower design. These images quote Dutch Golden Age paintings, in presentation size, composition and colour balance. Still Life painting, in which the illusion of reality breaks down as you move towards the surface, is suggested in these works through a double illusion; moving towards the image you realize they are neither paintings of flowers nor photographs of actual flowers, but botanical constructs made from digital parts that mimic the real without actually depicting it.
“My artistic methods have progressed from traditionally focused painting, drawing and collage, to the utilization of digital imagery and Photoshop. The digital medium has allowed me to develop a unique, pop-up book aesthetic that resembles, yet breaks with, traditional practices for making art. I aim to develop a practice that honours nature while celebrating technology, an important concern in an age when humans are struggling to find a balance with the planet that sustains us.”
To create these works, Rodrigues mines the Internet for images from which he borrows pixels of color, using Photoshop to manipulate the pixels in a painterly fashion to generate a library of elements (e.g., trees, flowers, rocks, water, clouds), which he then assembles in a collage-like manner. While his work exploits and utilizes the digital environment for its building blocks, it is rooted within two core traditions of contemporary art, Landscape and Still Life.
Rodrigues’ Planets are a fictional creation, but one that is already familiar to us from satellite and telescopic images of the Cosmos. These images are plausible to us as distant planetary objects, and we are conditioned to accept them as such by our exposure to the incredible photographs of the universe captured by earth and space-based telescopes. But they could also be seen as stages in the long-term evolution of our own Planet, which changes to reflect the natural and man-made systems that dictate its fate.
The Still Lifes are created by arranging flowers from his digital elemental library into bouquets, much like contemporary flower design. These images quote Dutch Golden Age paintings, in presentation size, composition and colour balance. Still Life painting, in which the illusion of reality breaks down as you move towards the surface, is suggested in these works through a double illusion; moving towards the image you realize they are neither paintings of flowers nor photographs of actual flowers, but botanical constructs made from digital parts that mimic the real without actually depicting it.
“My artistic methods have progressed from traditionally focused painting, drawing and collage, to the utilization of digital imagery and Photoshop. The digital medium has allowed me to develop a unique, pop-up book aesthetic that resembles, yet breaks with, traditional practices for making art. I aim to develop a practice that honours nature while celebrating technology, an important concern in an age when humans are struggling to find a balance with the planet that sustains us.”
