Naples, 2015

Permanent Display

Annarumma, March 7 - April 7

The paintings in Permanent Display use the motif of stone and rock as a departure point for exploring the recent intersection between painting and digital technology. Staniak’s paintings in this exhibition are very physical, with his finger gestures intersecting the casting compound from which they are made. For Staniak, the physical act of painting is defiant to the very aesthetic he achieves and the technology on which most artwork is displayed. Pixels were once used to describe an image as digital; now it is the absence of the physical that seems more relevant of that description. Staniak’s paintings in this exhibition are at once a digital composition and a physical image, made to be both experienced in person and on our screens in very different ways.

In his series of BMP paintings, stock images of stone found in online databases are printed onto the surface. These images have been stretched, twisted, cut, copied and pasted, to create a montage of seemingly weightless compositions. The digitally UV printed stone images alludes to heaviness but are indeed an almost weightless layer of ink applied to a hard undulated surface that Staniak has produced beforehand. The contradictory nature of the materials he utilizes and the resulting images produced, are at the heart of his investigation into how we view, store and rely on digital information in our current age. In so doing, Staniak’s paintings question the truth value of digital images and reinforce the need to experience the physical as a counterpoint to our digital age.