Deep, Illusionals #6

A woman raises a finger to her lips, asking for silence. Rendered in blocks of blue, pink and black, the gesture reads like a paused screen. Illusionals calls the pixel, the most familiar unit of the digital age, back onto the canvas, and here it carries the vocabulary of our devices: mute, pause, silent mode. Yet the pixel is pulled away from the flawless surface of the screen and turned into matter, each square painted by hand in thick impasto. Reproducing the industrial through manual labour, the work occupies the distance between the consumed image and lived matter. The figure is never quite there; within that absence, the act of looking itself becomes visible..