In his research, Quayola, a well-known artist on the international contemporary scene, questions the hierarchies between what is human, natural, and technological. His work explores new esthetics and algorhythmic visions arisen from working with the technical devices that observe and codify the world.

Storms pursues Quayola’s scrutiny of traditional landscape painting, using advanced technologies to explore its pictorial substance. The Storms’s series are digital paintings, and yet in continuity with the painting of the historic legacy. Ultra-high definition videos of stormy seas shot on the coasts of Cornwall are used like a dataset from which to draw so as to produce the digital paintings. The video is not the matrix of the painting, instead it is the data inferred by it: vectors and chromia, forces and intensity.

Quayola works “by painting like something already painted” using techniques never yet used for painting. The esthetics, arisen not from the painstaking practice of the gesture on the canvas but from algorhythms, arouses a new astonishment before a nature seen as for the first time, alien but recognizable. The artist codifies reality, blending mnemonic, historic, and retinic knowledge. The machine is programmed to produce a “traditional painting” out of the digital substance: a pixel painting.