Quayola. Storms

MakerArt is the special section of Maker Faire Rome - The European Edition 2022, 10th edition that provides user with opportunities for dialogue between the makers and the international artists chosen by Valentino Catricalà (curator of the section). This edition presents the work STORMS by the artist QUAYOLA.

Promoted and organized by the Rome Chamber of Commerce through its Azienda Speciale Innova Camera, Maker Faire Rome - The European Edition 2022 - the 10th edition dedicated to creativity and technological innovation, will take place at the iconic Gazometro Ostiense from October 7 to 9, 2022.

As is well known, Quayola's research moves in the combination of digital, robotics and artifi-cial intelligence and an iconography rooted in art history, from ancient, Renaissance and Baroque, to the genre of landscape, from Romantic to Impressionist. STORMS is a work that is part of a series of video works that sits squarely in this cross-section, continuing the artist's research into traditional landscape painting, where what is explored, through the use of advanced technologies, is not so much the image itself but instead the pictorial substance, understood both as material and as the medium of the ideational origin of the image itself.

Even the title, STORMS is an obvious reference to the work of Englishman William Turner and his famous storms, which are an important source of inspiration for Quayola. They illustrate that stirring of cosmic forces, that whirlwind of light, that motion, that vortex that enraptures the human soul, bringing it into ecstasy, and which in STORMS is translated into the realization of ul-tra-high definition videos of real stormy seas shot on the Cornish coast, a place of inspiration also of Turner, used as a dataset from which to draw to generate the di-gital paintings. In fact, as always in Quayola and as curator Valentino Catricalà has often pointed out, the filming, the "from life" part, is not the work but is only the moment of capturing the data, which, once imprisoned are re-processed with game engine processes.

Turner's energies, in Quayola's paintings, are thus the digital vectors that impart forces. In STORMS, motion, is not an animation, not an external influence, but an internal motion, an eruption of inherent dynamics. Dynamics that are exaggerated and allowed to flow in a contemplation of the natural-digital sublime. STORMS are, finally, unfinished paintings, works that "paint themselves" in the flux of a dilated time, pictorial forms that unravel on the canvas of the screen breaking down into an abstraction of forms.... read the rest of the article»