GARRETT PRUTER

Generation Loss

Opening : Friday, June 13 from 5 to 10pm

Exhibition : 14 june > 26 july 2014

Untitled, 2014, Photographic emulsion and acrylic paint on canvas, 40 x 30 cm

In the gallery’s second exhibition of works by New York artist Garrett Pruter, Galerie Virginie Louvet presents a new series of « Photographic Emulsion Paintings » in which notions of photographic reproduction, painterly process and color perception are vigorously reinterpreted.

This new body of work expands upon techniques introduced in the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery, a series of emulsion paintings that investigated themes of nostalgia and loss through the extraction of pigments from internet-sourced photographs.

Central to Pruter’s work is the idea that the artist’s process is of equal importance to the finished work.

For this exhibition, Pruter takes photographs of various hues of pre-mixed paint. Reproducing these manufactured colors in multiple stages, each copy skews further away from the original paint’s hue. This gradual distortion of information is sometimes referred to as « generation loss », a process in which data and imagery are known to degrade in quality through each subsequent reproduction.

The paintings play off of this deterioration, culminating when Pruter scratches the emulsion from the surface of  the photographs and combines it back into the original paint from which the photographs were derived.

Throughout this circular process, materials are constantly shifting as paint becomes photographs and photographs become paint. Despite the mechanical process of fusing together these two disjointed mediums, an unexpected sensuality is revealed to the viewer through the paintings’ gradually accumulated layers of texture.

The resulting abstractions are further generated through each subtractive and additive application of color, variations which point out the altered and subjective ways in which we attempt to perceive color and material through increasingly detached technological formats.

Garrett Pruter lives and works in New-York.

Press contact : contact@virginielouvet.com / + 33 1 42 71 97 48 / Galerie Virginie Louvet / 48 rue Chapon 75003 Paris