Davis Museum Barcelona: Neoptiks Beta

Karen Aune: Neoptiks β

2011

Davis Museum May 1 – August 31, 2011 

KAREN AUNE, (Brasília, Brazil, 1971) 

Neoptiks, 2010, digital print and oil on canvas, 5,9 x 5,9 x 3,9 

In spite of the fact that technology has turned into an inevitable «way» trough which we think this one also it is in the map» of a time for coming […] to the form that will adopt this culture in this future time. » (1) 

The work of Karen Aune communicates strangeness, sequences that for all it’s uprooting they create a short circuit opposite to any effort to try to understand them. This work is constructed from visual patrons extracted as autonomous organs that across the software it repeats, climbs and moves from a work to another. Neoptiks makes neither a sense of beginning nor end; its elements flow paradoxically in the space though the suggestion of a narrative of vague familiar forms persists in this work. 

The manipulation of the program – intermediate act between the original image and the prototype bases of the painting – has direct consequences in its final appearance; the infinite scale in which the images can reproduce from the computer seems to dilute from appearances, volume, space, and perspective over the pictorial surface. The colors sometimes are flat and others contaminated, saturated and vibrant. The digital image does not stop existing implicitly inside the painting and therefore it works as device of a «spetacularized» recreation as a simulacrum of the reality to come. 

(…) Neoptiks, arranges as signs of the reality a system of abnormalities that are reminiscent of El Bosco; exist in this work a certain voyeurism that is the continuation of the work with structures that depart from the organic thing as the body, as basic condition of the material thing across the topologic exhibition of the tissue as the original element and mutant, as redemptions of Adam and Eve in which the subject seems visceral. This way, the visual acts of our current society produce acts of seeing and to devote seeing itself, of looking and being seen across which the subject is produced. This performative visual act is articulated across the experience of the subject by the field of the vision, in such a way that the own subject of vision comes to be controlled as such by the decisive power of this field. (2) 

(1) José Luis Brea. El tercer Umbral: estatuto de las prácticas artísticas en la era del capitalismo cultural. (2) Idem 1 Karen Aune was Born in Brasil in 1971, lives and work in Bogotá, Colombia since 2006, currently working as an assistant professor at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. * The project Neoptiks was the recipient of the call for funding research projects and creation of the Department of Design 2009, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá *