Quayola takes the tradition of western art and rethinks it through the most advanced contemporary technology, which he gives a new role: no longer as a tool but a partner to exchange notes with and explore new possible ways of reading reality.
The exhibition revolves around the idea of perfection and its meaning in the history of western art. In Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, this term often recurs to indicate the excellence achieved by painters, sculptors and architects, with regard to what are considered the universal canons of harmony and beauty. Quayola applies algorithms to classical, modern and Baroque masterpieces in search of these canons, challenging the fundamental principles of art. The rules encoded by historiography and criticism are rendered into sets of information, lines that when read by the machine take on new values and give rise to new aesthetic codes.
The show presents a video installation and four series of works, two of which produced for the occasion: a sequence of sculptures and a series of works on paper, some of which will become part of the drawing collections managed by Fondazione Modena Arti Visive.