Barry Doupé
AMIGA Works
Curated by Post Brothers
November 4, 2021 – January 28, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Swallow
Swallow is delighted to present Barry Doupé’s AMIGA Works, the Vancouver-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe.
When the Commodore AMIGA was released in 1985, it was marketed as the world’s first multimedia multitasking personal computer. Using the gendered conventions of boyish programmers, the computer’s name (Spanish for “female friend”) gave an impression of “user-friendliness” and placed it alphabetically in front of its competitors Atari and Apple. To persuade early PC users who wanted a “creative edge”, the launch even featured a demonstration by Andy Warhol, who generated a live portrait of Debbie Harry on stage, and remarked that he liked how the pixelated images already looked like his own artwork. Due to its peculiar graphic and processing capabilities, the AMIGA became the go-to tool for animation, video editing, graphics, and video game design in the 80s and early 90s. Key to this popularity was Electronic Art’s bitmap graphic editing software Deluxe Paint, which was first developed as an in-house art development tool that gradually became the de facto image and animation editor for the platform. The program’s broad range of features and its novel interface design set a standard, and anticipated the influence and ubiquity of digital image making and animation today.
AMIGA Works features an unabridged presentation of Barry Doupé’s 100 AMIGA Paintings (2016), an extensive series of pictures made on the commodore AMIGA with the software Deluxe Paint V (the final version of the program). For many years, Doupé has used these tools from a bygone era to generate some of his idiosyncratic animations, which draw from the subconscious and are developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. The artist began the ambitious, yet somehow manageable, task of making 100 paintings as a sort of casual respite during the laborious five-year production of his psychosexually charged animated film Distracted Blueberry (2019). The hundredfold static images on display at Swallow were produced as a sort of procedural game of meditative problem solving, an exercise in creativity with constraints.
By interrogating the technical quirks and bizarre accidents of the pixelated software as a language, Doupé explores its peculiar influence on the production of pictures. Each individual image has its own rules, addressing generic conventions from the history of painting using specific tools, features, or restrictions in the anachronistic program. Intuitive, playful, surreal, and unpretentious, every painting is its own unique and engaging puzzle that teases thematic tropes and explores specific formal principles such as figure/ground relations, mark making, gesture, repetition, perspective, tension, flatness, representation, compositional weight, landscape, materiality, texture, surface, color, portraiture, and so on. The resulting hecatontarchical hoard gives an overview of the basic categories of pictorial practice, demonstrating painting’s conventions and constant redefinition through an impressive inventory of eccentric flat images. As singularities, each painting articulates its own logic and demands, but as a multitude, a narrative emerges between control, automatism, and the painterly that confuses any assumptions about the sacred role of the artist’s hand and the impersonality of the machine.
This use of passé technologies and media invokes a nostalgic melancholia for a cultural techno-adolescence. Neither ironic nor fetishistic, the series functions as a sort of counterpoint to the ideology of high-definition realism in digital media today. Given painting’s status as a stand-in for art-as-such, the transformation of painterly gestures into code that outputs pixelated imagery suggests the annihilation of differences between mediums by the digital. Indeed, this poor resolution incorporation of the past (and all information generally) into the digital world recalls Deluxe Paint’s own iconic sample images of Botticelli’s Venus and the visage of King Tut. Doupé responds to the digital logic of quantification by exploring qualitative transformations. The conflict between hand and technology is perhaps most apparent in “hard edge” abstractions that upon closer inspection, divulge broken, fragmented, pixelated lines. By revealing and disfiguring qualities that are seen as “essential” or “inherent” to painting and digital graphics, painting is revealed not as specific liquid material applied to a surface, but as a procedure, a mode of thinking and doing.
The laserjet printouts of digital bitmap images are paintings because they were made with Deluxe Paint. Its interface is a skeuomorphic simulation of the painter’s toolbox and blank canvas. The artist draws lines by the simple drag of his mouse, modifies and transform them, fills fields of color with a single ‘click’, and changes parameters and tools with a combination of hotkeys. The essence of Deluxe Paint brushes is this: anything can be a brush, so you can paint with a single pixel, a pictorial element, a whole screen, or anything in-between. With each click of the mouse and key pressed, Doupé opens a field of virtualities, demonstrating a kind of imagination based not on the interpretation of the world but on calculating effects.
Deluxe Paint incorporated animation into its graphic user interface and overall operating logic, allowing the user to produce images in sequences, “color cycle” the entire palette to make still images appear to move, and had an “animbrush” setting whereby animated sequences could be moved around like any other element on the screen. Doupé’s video loops Vhery (2013) and Whaty (2012) stretch the animation capacities of the software to its lineaments and, in doing so, uncovers some of animation’s core principles. Vhery is an abstract looping sequence of lines and textured planes, repeating state changes and moments of vulnerability, evolution, involution, and overturning. Though it may appear as if the sequences are stochastically auto-generating, the video was “hand” drawn frame by frame, pixel by pixel. The line is given an uncanny independent agency, perfectly illustrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comments that:
“The beginning of the line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line, “to go line.” Relative to it, every subsequent inflection will have a diacritical value, will be another aspect of the line’s relationship to itself, will form an adventure, a history, a meaning of the line…” (“Eye and Mind,” 183)
At times, the computer graphic lines correlate to give the impression of recognizable forms emerging, but these never resolve, leaving a continuously changing painting where the formal elements and their relations are in constant renegotiation. Doupé’s looped video Whaty further teases disequilibrium and the will to recognize patterns in random information, provoking pareidolia by portraying a series of morphing human faces. The video is an updated homage to James Stuart Blackton’s 1906 Humorous Phases of Sunny Faces, one of the earliest animated films, which used stop motion and “lightning sketches” on a chalkboard to produce comic scenarios. Here, Doupé explores the ways personality and countenance are used to give drawings life in animation and by addressing the face as a site of identification and expression. At any moment, the moving visages are caught somewhere between their emergence into form and their disappearance into the formless, suggesting continuously changing identities and emotional states. This polymorphic capability to shift and change form is what Sergei Eisenstein described in the early animated cartoons of Walt Disney as “plasmaticity” based, of course, on the omnipotence of protoplasm, which contains in “liquid” form all possibilities of future species and forms. The video exposes a peculiar figuration found in animation that, as Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler note, is a “figuration in which the figure is no longer opposed to its dissolution but only given […] in or as its very dissolution.” Through these sketchy and squash-and-stretched modes of embodiment, Doupé draws attention to perception as always in process, and considers what animated worlds could mean for the self.
Through his labor-intensive sequences of images, Doupé explores how technical limitations and structural constraints can yield unexpected creative potentials. AMIGA Works makes visible that pictorial techniques have agency and determinations all their own. By exploring the AMIGA as an early multimedia device, the works unearth a certain coding of pictures in general that crosses media and traditions. Lev Manovich and other contemporary animation and media theorists often assert that due to the ubiquity of animated post-production in moving images today, “cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology, but rather a subgenre of painting.” One could go further with this and recognize that animation is not only an omnipresent logic in our contemporary images and interfaces, but also somehow appears at the origin of painting itself.
Barry Doupé (b. 1982 Victoria, BC, Canada) is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation. His films use imagery and language derived from the subconscious; developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. He often creates settings within which a characters’ self-expression or action is challenged and thwarted, resulting in comic, violent and poetic spectacles. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives (NY, USA), Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Canada), MOCCA (Toronto, Canada), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), and the Tate Modern (London, UK). His practice also includes music, performances, sculptures, drawings, writing, and digitally mediated images.
Text by Post Brothers
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Unrolled Moustache, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Unrolled Moustache (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Block (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Cylinder Bush, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Cylinder Bush, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Boats (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Vhery, 2013, 15 Sec, computer animation, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Handtrap, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Magic (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Traditional Peacock, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Horse Stack, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Lawn, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Purple Walker, 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Trouble Mountain (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Tail (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, Workers (detail), 2016, digital painting using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer, 22.6 x 24 cm, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
Barry Doupé, exhibition view, AMIGA Works at Swallow, photo: Laurynas Skeigiela
