After his last solo show in 2017, Daniel Canogar returns to Santander venue to show some of his new works, created in the last three years, brought together with the meaningful title Vestigios *.
If memory and its loss is the main topic that articulates his creative corpus, it is also his way to do it: a computational and generative art with an aesthetics based on social and historical research, which uses digital technology as media and subject of many of the reflections presented in the exhibition.
For instance, in Zen, Tide and Beat, Canogar emphasises the continuous and increasingly vertiginous obsolescence of the electronic devices we leave behind, full of remains from our lives. In these works, the artist gives a second chance to abandoned devices and “activates the collective memory they contain”, making us reflect on our connection with them. These pieces, part of Latencies series, consist of recycled electronic devices that lie on a screen, which revives them, like fragile remains of a bygone era.
Wayward is a generative work inspired by post-war artists who began to manipulate photographs taken from the press, such as Andy Warhol, Martha Rosler, Wolf Vostell and Robert Rauschenberg. This digital piece also processes photo-journalistic images, but this time filtered by the digital tool, creating visual effects that evoke these photochemical techniques of the past. Alongside this piece is the Wayward Stills series, frames derived from the generative version of Wayward and reproduced on metal plates. Each plate shows the image generated by the most outstanding news of different days chosen by the artist. A sort of mnemonic tool that, in the form of a visual calendar, archives the emblematic events of our days.
Chyron and Túnica 2 belong to Pixelweaver series as a metaphor for the social fabric created, and sometimes destroyed, by data. Chyron is rendered with the chyrons of news channels, which are the information over the lower part of the screen. The tickers intertwine like a large, frayed fabric, a tangle that evokes the fragile and at times unstable balance of an information ecosystem created from disparate and even conflicting sources. Updated in real time, this algorithmic artwork features chyrons of major international news channels. Nevertheless, Túnica 2 is a digital generative fabric created from the names of deceased contemporary artists. The names appear in relief over intertwined silver and golden sashes. It is inspired by Pre-Columbian funerary gauzes, and it is presented as a tribute to the life of these artists, who are determining in Contemporary Art.
Scrawl is a generative digital piece that reacts to Twitter trends in real time. The work’s software periodically collects the most mentioned topics in the Twitter community, issues that are translated in real time into an aesthetic of vandalism and protest graffiti that, unlike professional graffiti, are done quickly and anonymously. As a work in constant flux, Scrawl attempts to capture the multiple forces and tensions that cohabit social spaces such as Twitter. The result is an algorithmic work with an automatic poetics that constantly slips between the aesthetics of social protest and abstract painting.
Thus, in Vestigios, we can see how Daniel Canogar, a key contemporary artist, creates his works from the information that surrounds us massively, which is provided to us by media or the one we feed every day on social networks. Millions of data that become in his hands artistic material capable of creating metaphors that explain and move us. From instructions and algorithms, he generates digital landscapes that immerse us in sophisticated scenarios, sometimes more lyrical, sometimes more disturbing, that also bring us closer to the other side of the screen. In his generative works, the latest technologies dialogue and interpret past artistic manifestations with new codes, as well as themes such as memory, identity or art history.
*This exhibition has been produced in collaboration with Galería Max Estrella.
VESTIGIOS
July 8th – August 26th, 2023
DANIEL CANOGAR
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
10:30AM – 1:30PM
6PM – 9PM