New Print

Kapitaal, a screen print studio based in Utrecht, invited me for their New Print exhibition in February 2020. For this event a different artist is invited each month, to create a new screen print. It was the perfect opportunity for me to explore the relationship between my cgi work and analog printing techniques further.
In my digital 3D work I play around with bold & simple shapes, combined with soft textures, often having translucent characteristics. When translating these images into screen prints, the aim is to maintain the soft feel & smooth shadows that are an important part of my digital work. I have been experimenting a lot with different rasters to discover what raster works best with my work and gets the results Im after. In 2019 this led to extensive testing in which I discovered the limitations, and therefore the possibilities, of the printing technique in relation to my CGI work.
For the New Print I was able to dig into translucent materials even more, by experimenting with printing on matte acrylic sheets. The acrylic diffuses the light and blurs, the exact characteristics that became important in my digital work. The New Print exhibition was the result and presentation of these experiments resulting in some limited edition test prints on paper and some tests & prints on acrylic sheets.

The visual theme of the exhibition was the theory of relativity. Time is never absolute and the speed of time is relative to the viewer and it’s speed and acceleration. A difficult thing to wrap your head around and one can easily get lost in thinking about time and how it’s just a human concept. We feel time as something linear, but it’s just our perception of it. 
The position of the viewer is also defining the work made; the shadows are smooth and feel solid; but when the viewer looks at the back of the acrylic sheet, a more raw and rasterised version of the visual is found.
That way the digital and analog world is connected in a circular way; translucent materials and shapes that started as digitally generated images find their way into the analog technique of screen printing; using the same material as discovered and experimented with digitally.

Digital Explorations

The work shown above are silk screen prints; hand printed by me, with lots of support & love from the people at Kapitaal. That being said; all the work found it’s starting point in CGI and 3d software in which I play with procedural tools and dynamics to roughly explore compositions. Once I have a composition that pleases me I go to refine it and then light and render the work in Octane. After that the tedious process starts of retouching for screen printing.

The Exhibition

20-20-2020 20:00 Kapitaal, Utrecht