ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 148

ART Habens
Jean-Marie Guyaux
Away from the constraints of commercial
photography, the images that piqued my
interest tended to reflect symbols of the
human condition, the state of pervasive
violence present in American society, and
the deliberate and gratuitous acts of
violence by individuals bent on tearing
down the present without any intended
thought towards a viable solution. Often
already altered by such vandalism before
my intervention, “Slash” with its
remnants/fragments of subway advertising
posters containing primarily facial images
“slashed” by human forces, enables me to
enhance, re-frame and create personal
portraits of reference out of the
mysteriously exposed layers of the past. A
new beauty, often misogynistic, at once at
odds yet beyond the original message. In
“Slash” beauty that is addition by
subtraction is introduced. The rough,
jagged edginess of Clyfford Still meets the
contemporary city-dweller Jean-Michel
Basquiat.
While my photography in “Slash” as well as
in my “Crash” series captures an abstract
reality that is the up-close remnants of the
subject as it dissolves into an abstraction
of color, line, and picture plane, my digital
art manipulates the raw data of an image
to create abstraction. In my “Icons –
Americana” series I explore the world of
our most well-known and memorable
imagery and subject their digital content to
non-photographic software. In so doing, I
create new layers of pixels that generate a
hybrid and mind-altering visual. The
outcome is a mystifying re-interpretation of
the image, recognized and transformed,
imprinted in one’s memory, a journey of
changes. With a smile some have called it
Pop, Neo-pop or even Nouveau-pop.
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