From digital glitches to mind-boggling distortions, artist from Mexico City Alexis Mata is interested in how visual information is lost or distorted as it shifts from one context to another. In his oil paintings, bouquets and vast desert landscapes spread across the canvas as if melting or stretching into unrecognizable shapes. “If your eyes look at the same thing for too long, your mind creates the change,” he says.
Mata explores the relationship between analog and digital domains, and his process encompasses both forms of art making. Preliminary sketches fill notebooks that travel wherever the artist goes, constantly taking photos and recording videos for reference.
AI experiments help Mata better translate the strange, disorienting results these rapidly evolving tools can produce. But his research is not just visual. “I like to experiment by writing poems or haikus in AI and seeing what comes out. It is an exploratory process,” he notes.
Rendered in bold color palettes, the trippy paintings draw connections between digital mishaps and the ways our brains distort an image, whether in moments of intense focus, in dream states, or with the help of hallucinogenic substances. “I like to think that entire worlds are created in dreams, and these worlds are asking to be brought into the light,” he says.
Many of the paintings shown here can be seen in Mirage until January 25 at The hole in Tribeca. Discover more of Mata’s work, which ranges from stained glass and textiles to drawings and sculpture his website And Instagram.
