The splodgy, stuttering, textured, joyfully colourful surfaces of Petra Cortright’s paintings are single frozen moments of digital time. Get up close and you see repeated, copy-pasted imagery – you then realise that all these ‘brushstrokes’ are pure Photoshop, that those textures are just digital effects.
The young American artist takes the disposable, consumer-media aesthetic of Pinterest boards and internet searches and condenses it all down into glittering paintings. The same flower appears again and again, identically. There are little multi-coloured gestural swirls, blobs of liquid-looking pigment. It’s not even HD, the works are all granulated and imperfect. It’s like she’s taken her browsing, her internet ADHD, and actually made something out of it.
One work features a repeated female nude – like Cortright is seeing art history as just another thing to turn into a Photoshop brush, just another aesthetic tool. A massive screen in the corner lets you watch a painting unfurl like an opulent gif. Three marble sculptures – all twisting geometry and lovely smoothness – feel like physical manifestations of a digital artist’s hand movements.
Cortright’s work is a total celebration of colour and form. That fanatical, grinning wonderment that races through the very earliest abstraction of the twentieth century is right here, reborn in the heady rush of realising how pretty technology can be, knowing for certain that the internet can mean something more than itself.
But it’s a bolshy, angry move, too: this is an FU, as if Cortright is saying she doesn’t need conceptual waffle and politics to make good art. Sometimes it’s ok for art to just look really, really good.
@eddyfrankel
