Aaron Scheer

Aaron Scheer disrupts and abuses the mathematic language of interface code direct at the source. His printer paintings and large format digital paintings rely directly on the post-analogue for physical production. Making the technology work directly for him in the production of digital paintings and prints, Aaron Scheer manipulates imaging software perhaps in order to re-think the trajectory of so called abstract painting. Sometimes with vague stylistic resemblance to the big hitters of that genre like Hans Hoffman or Jackson Pollock, the works glow with glitch, blur, wipe and miss registration. The printer paintings, often sent through a printer several times, are pushed and pulled as they go, to create diverging overlapping zones of colour, in a mechanical nod to overpainting on coloured grounds or glazing with translucent oil paint. More directly, the miss-use of the document maker to produce ‘other’ by pulling, ramming, shoving etc is perhaps a genius bastardisation. 

The larger format digital paintings, sometimes constructed from degraded imagery from those found online or personal photographs, are bold in their apparent lackadaisical use of a blur tool, to disrupt the frenetic grounds of glitched information and data. If glitch is the representation of the kinks in bureaucratic systems, then Scheer’s works take that aesthetic to new formal heights. The mediation of what might be big data, how it appears to speed without disruption through phone cables across the planet is significant here. These digi paintings, printed with expensive ink on archival papers, are a testament to a reality that we as humans cannot always see. Of course, data is comprised of collections of numbers letters and symbols. We know we can take the code of a jpeg, write in some words of our own, and re-print, or re-screen a now corrupted image. What Scheer does here is take corruption of data and code further to, like Charley Peters, show us what part of the matrix actually looks like.

Read an interview with Aaron here