Carl-Robert Kagge’s solo exhibition “Four-Grain Image” is a site-specific work inspired by the location of Vitriingalerii, displaying a hauntological image of Instagram’s infinite database. Replacing the glass walls of the gallery with a canvas of bent plastic, Kagge continues developing his original artistic technique.
Internet is not merely a platform or surface – it’s a space. Uploaded data and imags twist, deform, spoil, relocate, alternate in sharpness and colour, and at times wander without ever fully achieving their intended scope, depending on the speed of internet connection and screen on which they appear. Edited, layered, cut, filtered, curated and converted into massive blocks of data, these images construct our sense of reality, even though they might be gone far beyond any realistic semblance. It is like phantom pain, perceived as stemming from a limb that is no longer part of the body.
Carl-Robert Kagge’s work “Four-Grain Image” gives images found online a physical, stable, yet subjective form, leaving room for the viewer’s speculations. It’s based on the understanding that there is no set hierarchy in materials shared online and so, the artist abstracts the motifs of these found images, making them his own and materialising them as artworks for his audience.
The artist has brought the image wandering in the maze of data back to where it was born, to physical environment. Although, on the way back to its original form the image has traversed various environments and has thus become something new.
The title of the show refers to the manual technique the artist uses to apply the motifs onto plastic, silkscreen printing. On the other hand, this marks the process an image uploaded to the internet goes through before reaching the viewer: mutations on the screen used to view the image.
Carl-Robert Kagge is a painter, focusing on images found on social media and their materialisations in physical space. The artist’s original technique consists of silkscreen printing and applying the images on heat-shaped plastic. Gathering his visual material on various online platforms, Kagge creates a subjective archive of past and present that has not much to do with collectively perceived space of reality. Using already existing visual material, the artist composes a unique field of images that does not always comply with straightforward categorisation. Kagge skilfully navigates
multiple fields: painting, printing, design, internet culture, technology, and graffiti. Looking at Kagge’s work on computer screen, it may resemble Photoshop comps, however, exhibited in physical space we see painting-hybrids, blurred photos abstracted until they become unrecognisable. A similar effect occurs when phones fail to load Instagram photos in full resolution due to slow internet connection.
All of this leads the viewer to be confronted with hyper-physicality: a mix of virtual and material shaped into something almost haunting. Kagge’s work skilfully reflects a state increasingly taking hold of people – a time and space, where technology has become a permanent artificial limb and where it has become almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the simulated.
The exhibition is on view until 7 September and can be viewed on 24 hours basis.
Vitriingalerii, Tallinn, Põhja pst 35.
14 August 2020 – 7 September 2020.
Curator: Lilian Hiob
Photography: Kristina Õllek