Joseph NECHVATAL - prOtOcOls nOn (nO rules)

Press release

The American artist Joseph Nechvatal presents a series of new paintings on velvet, in his new exhibition at Galerie Richard, Paris, titled prOtOcOls nOn (nO rules), from May 30th to July 19^th, 2014. The title insists on the immediate and spontaneous dimension of the relation to the body and the cosmos.

The image is modified by the intervention of a computer virus that destroys and recomposes the image. These paintings, figurative and abstract, microscopic and macroscopic, and whose central scale would be that of the body, share a pantheistic view of the world. The print media, a velvet tissue, brings a satin, matte and sensual aspect. 

The works present in the exhibition are influenced by the book Philosophy and Simulation by Manuel da Landa, and the avant-garde music of the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Nechvatal is a post-conceptual artist that has used and worked with computer technology since 1986. His paintings and computer animations are subject to human body images, which are transformed by digital virus. With the help of the programmer Stéphane Sikora, Joseph Nechvatal created an artificial life system programmable computer that produces behavioral characteristics manipulated by the active viral systems. This work has resulted in contamination of classical painting on canvas by digital technology. He created an interface between the virtual and the real, which Nechvatal calls viractual. That was in France, as an artist in residence at Salines Royales d’Arbois from 1991 to 1993 and in the Foundation Claude Nicolas Ledoux at Arc-et-Senans from 1992 to 1993, that he first designed virtual virus in relation with the paint.

 Nechvatal recently exposed at NOISE, Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, the Biennale di Venezia, Eventi collaterali, an exhibition based on his book Immersion Into Noise (Open Humanities Press, 2011). His works are in the collections of MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, The Jewish Museum in New York, and The Malmö Kunsthall in Malmo, Sweden.