EFFETS DE SOIR

QUAYOLA

"Technology is for me an opportunity to discover completely new ways of seeing, essentially a way to expand further our senses." - Quayola

Faena Art Project Room

November 29, 2022  - January 7, 2023

Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, the figurative and the abstract, the old and the new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Displayed in the Faena Project Room, the video series Effets de Soir will continue the artists’ ongoing focus on nature, pictorial traditions and new technological apparatuses.

The title references the natural phenomena visible at dusk and dawn, when lights and shadows, warm and cold tones, fade into one another – an impression many artists, from Monet to Van Gogh, have attempted to transpose on canvas. Quayola engages with this heritage by combining natural and artificial stimuli, presenting his own effets de soir. At the core of Effets de Soir are ultra-high-resolution photographs of flowers from the lush gardens of Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire, a 10th-century French Castle, shot at night under artificial spotlights. The captured botanical compositions become raw data for Quayola’s computational paintings, audio-visual scores that experiment with different evolving compositions and rhythms. The artist offers hybrid visions of the natural world, through software specially programmed to analyze and re-synthesize its components, approaching a new form of algorithmic Impressionism.