Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel” Digitizes Life and Nature For Contorno Urbano. 12+1 Project

Painting on the street and the field of painting. The color field. Your field of reference.

Joan Cabrer is pixelating the artificial and the natural, placing them on the same playing field.

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Winner of the Sotheby’s Scholarship Medal given by the Miró Foundation and participant in a number of artists residencies and gallery exhibitions since the start of his artist career a little over a decade ago, Cabrer can be seen as being from a certain generation that became romantically involved with the early years of our digital aesthetics formed from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s.

Those simplistic blocked screen renderings of the world were friendly, alien, and reductive; instantly futuristic in our imaginations. At first graphic, now more painterly, his works now freely associate with the bio-scientific – static representations of flickering life and ecosystem.

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Here for his new mural created for Contorno Urbano’s 12+1 project in Barcelona, Cabrer toys with the “glitch” factor that roughly distorts, then returns us to a normality within our altered virtual reality. What point does digital mixed so often and so thoroughly that we can’t imagine the real with the virtual?

“In this series that I’ve been working on the technological references abound. They shows how the digital mutation interacts with references that belong to the organic world,” he says. “The nature observed from a scientific point of view is mixed with digital aesthetics.”