Point Blank, Illusionals #2

A man in a fedora, caught in profile as the shadow of a gun closes in. Shards of colour break across the film-noir scene, freezing the tension at its peak. In Illusionals, the familiar fragments of the comic strip and the advertising image are set into the pixel grid, and here the language of the crime story is reduced to a few sharp marks: a brim, a jawline, a barrel. Just as Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots turned the printing process into painting, the pixel takes on the same role, pulled away from the flawless surface of the screen and turned into matter. Every square is built in thick impasto, reproducing the industrial through manual labour. Which is the image, and which the illusion?