Electronic Eurus 2015

Stepan Ryabchenko made this image, Electronic Eurus, using digital tools, sometime around now. Ryabchenko’s color palette feels both soft and electric – pastel blues and pinks zapped with neon orange and yellow. It’s a delicious combination and he’s working with it in a way that, for me, totally embraces the process of artmaking. It’s all about the layering and building up of forms that feel both organic and totally artificial. Take a look at how Ryabchenko uses these looping lines in the background. They remind me of those endless lines you get when you’re fiddling with a Spirograph as a kid, but they are also so smooth, and sleek, that they could only be created digitally. These lines, in combination with the folds and pleats of the central form, create a sense of depth but also flatness; a sense of a thing emerging from a void. It makes me think of other artists working with digital forms like Claudia Maté, where there is a similar interest in the tension between surface and depth, between the handmade and the computer-generated. It’s all part of this ongoing conversation about what art can be in the digital age.