Michael Genovese Intervals

Michael Genovese’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Intervals, presents a new body of work comprised of large-scale paintings of urethane on gessoed canvas, which visually derive from screen grabs of keyword image searches, specifically, the grid that briefly appeared while images were loading on his mobile phone. Proportionally scaled to the screen ratio, these paintings replicate the exact color and pattern that occurred during each image query interim. For over ten years, social practice and archives have remained an active interest for the artist, as he has worked through various methods and diverse pursuits toward accumulating material.

In this instance, Genovese used a macro approach to amass content, revealing that a broader source yields a more abstract result. Each piece in the Interval series images a minimalist version of simulacra. The artist re-created original artworks appropriated from digital substitutes for representational images – compositions that are now hyper-real, and subsequently truthful, in their own right. He permanently suspended algorithmic artifice by identifying these search-engine thumbnail placeholders as aesthetic illuminations.

Searching words like “hesitation” or “guilt” became concepts within these split seconds intervals, where he beheld sophisticated hybrids of color theory and pure abstraction in the least expected place, on the plainest plane, during a fraction of a seemingly incidental instant. Through a rigorous and technically involved process, these paintings canonize anticipation. Genovese exalts the expectorant moment, recognizing that the pause before expectation often transcends the expected outcome.

Today, any moment or thing can become decisive (as trend, fashion, crowd sourced, etc.) provided it is supported through the appropriate media channels and public platform. And as is also well known, such instants die out as quickly as they are made. Easy come easy go. And this is precisely what Genovese has brought into focus by transforming a set of exceedingly banal passing moments––moments not meant to be noted let alone reflected on––into frozen and static paintings, immortalized in time. Put differently, by aestheticizing the most vernacular slice of the infrathin, Genovese brings into resolution the pervasive ways in which our high-speed culture privileges nothing and values reflection even less. As artists, thinkers, or cultural producers, it is our responsibility to reevaluate such cultural throwaways, even if only to restore a much-needed pause in the nonstop march to greater and greater acceleration. (Excerpt from Carolyn Kane’s essay, Bridge Time)