TEXT BOOK

Supersublime

Sacha Craddock, 2023

The loop of always only being able to see what is now because of a strong relation to the past, is perfectly proposed by the man in Caspar David Friedrich’s ultimate Romantic painting who stands with his back to us. In the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, he surveys a recognisable rugged landscape that remains apparently unknown. Without hiding in the invisibility of the digital, or placing itself between the leaves of everyday life, the range of work in Supersublime, which carries an emphatically mannered and insistent presence about it, cannot help but appear both imbued with and enchanted by existent imagery.

The early CGI works carry a sense, however stumbling and basic, of excitement in the literal construction of an image. This, amusingly, echoes a tendency in art students decades earlier to attempt to grasp the physical manifestation of technological invention by using oil on canvas to represent the leads that come out of a computer, for instance, or the stilled action on a television screen. From a manifestation of reality by hand, as it were, through to the virtual and now visibly distant, shifts are generally absorbed to become almost nostalgic.

Supersublime is about being at a point in time where it is possible to peer over the edge to grasp a vista of a future that lies in a landscape that is already known. If it can be done artistically, it will grasp this, but need it look different? Affective artistic production arrives more out of an understanding that great expression comes out of the slightest shift in genre rather than the radical modern statement.

Damien Roach’s Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (1997) makes direct reference to when, in 1997, a game of chess was played between the chess grandmaster and a computer. Here Roach, whose work also consists of the construction of real space, and a range of ‘facsimile’ objects; acrylic discs and a Corona bottle that has fallen to the floor spills beer forever, while the dashed ice cream melts in perpetuity. All work that is perhaps nostalgic for, and illustrative of, a time in which it was possible to be conscious of a single narrative at the very beginning of AI. Whilst freely going in and out of the technological nuts and bolts of CGI and the aesthetics of 3D printing, we remain threatened, however, by the unseen and unknown, and therefore the invisible machination of AI.

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It is hard to escape a process of the making of something virtually, piece by piece, in order for it to gain form; the shiny, cold, smoothly surfaced ghost that hovers somewhere down the corridor has to be grasped, somehow. The range of work in Supersublime seems thoroughly aware of the fact the visual virtual world represents exactly a struggle between the notion of invention and the power of the associative image. In a simple way, as ever, nostalgia can also lie in the circular fact that artists continue to recreate and revive also what an audience continues to expect.

Almost grand in presence and display, the mannered bird by Theo Ellison manages to push fully rounded graphic hearts, like those from a virtual card, out from an open beak. It is impossible to get a real outline of this active passive peacock with reflective eye, luxuriant blue feathers and flames that shoot from its nostrils, placed somewhere in front of a landscape that recedes to a nonetheless understandable situation. Light linked metallic text which spells ‘man of culture’ flows forward into space like a scroll unfurled from the top of an apocalyptic Renaissance painting.

Another peacock; grey, naked and unencumbered, with basic lines for its crest instead of bright bouncy spots, has been sent into virtual action this time without colour. Somehow giving in to monochrome, the rubbery bird appears as a manifestation of design and ambition that is conversely more suggestive of aesthetic purity. Much like any generic generated image, the grey, nearly white, plastic bird is in a way mimicking the sculptural. Such a relation to sculpture, to the fact that three dimensions, apparently made real and activated virtually, mark a moment in the historical representation that in turn cannot help but be mimicked.

With heightened ‘Super’ force, everything carries the sense that it needs to overperform or die. Rather like the heightened, adolescent humour and situation of Superbad, the hilarious coming of age film made in 2007, Supersublime as a notion represents the understanding that a minimal approach to anything will no longer work. 00 Zhang’s sharply pointed winged body seems to suggest a prototype that can, and does, inhabit differing forms and contexts. Somewhat gothic in sense, it alludes to the machinery of an angel, or mother, and with its own futuristic mechanised method, it becomes a mere accumulated, armoured surface making fake functional sense. By directly referring to the slick nature of video game aesthetics the artist is able to play with the virtual construction of the physical, while Prototype 0022 displays a more basic relation to gravity and the source of energy.

Nostalgia lies in the fact that the contemporary artist is inevitably caught between a process of construction and the use of found image or occasion. To maintain a physicality that must exist, Supersublime presents a deliberately fulsome range of material, media and methods. Images for the future and the past merge in a swamp of associative expectation. Sofia Albina Novikoff Unger’s fox, for instance, which features in part for real in the guise of bad taxidermy; is there for association; from fable to farmyard, fairy tale to city centre, the real fox extends its great cunning and flexible powers, surviving and adapting to changing circumstances.

Keeping up a relentless beat, with a ridiculously loose range of association and avatar, metal clash, fantasy, and heavy breathing, Theo Triantafyllidis’s Radicalization Pipeline RGP battle is just like an archetypical video game. The perpetual mash up of type, or types, is punctuated every now and then, by a red cap that paces across the mixed-up action, to create an earlier painted impression of struggle, but one now void of 19th and 20th century political ambitions of liberty leading the people. Green flags, held up en masse, become general, and so with non-specific a touch on perpetual overdrive, the artist is suggesting perhaps the relentless beat of corporate expansion and a resulting sense of powerlessness. By mimicking this, Triantafyllidis suggests an internalised metaphor for any artistic attempt to speak with reason. The object, person or people end up amounting to a sense of language with as much, or as little, scope as the menu of possible images in the tattoo parlour.

While in the transition between real to photograph, from photoreal to total construction, it is difficult to escape the shadow of romantic hope and endeavour. Imagery that intends to mimic the use of the found image or object cannot help but do that, to be revived, and yet this is another country in technological terms. Supersublime aims to mark a point and hold us all hovering, facing the same direction, at the edge of a particular moment. This combination of awkward force and ironic endeavour does show that the experience of experiencing art can still provide some kind of a way of countering the unseen.

Copyright Sacha Craddock, 2023

Supersublime is open daily at GIANT until Saturday 7th October, 2023

Photography by Jamie James