Jeff Elrod

Paolo Curti & Co., Milan
Through December 21

Jeff Elrod uses the computer, paradoxically, to produce intentionally low-tech digital paintings. Indeed, the artist uses the mouse to create simple graphic shapes that occupy huge monochromatic fields.

Born from the union of painting and the computer, the images merge the idea of creative freedom with that of the limits imposed on us by technology. The line that defines free abstract shapes or drawings inspired by elementary figuration appears constrained by the use of the mouse like a paintbrush that, under the imperfect mastery of the artist’s hand, does not always succeed in creating convincing forms.

Elrod brings to light the dissonance between the manual creative act and the perfect principles of mathematics that inform computer-graphics programs.

The artist’s vast fields of colors may be traced back to the origins of written communication’s first elementary shapes, such as cave drawings or hieroglyphics.

Like a new Rosetta Stone, Elrod’s “writing” offers a sort of key to reading the relationship between art and digital technology by means of an alphabet that helps us decipher the limits and meanings of such encounters, emphasizing, at the same time, the work of art’s absolute originality.




Elena Di Raddo
Translation by Amanda Coulson