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until 18.10. | #4448ARTatBerlin | OFFICE IMPART shows from Thursday, 05. September 2024 the exhibition Selection by the artist Jan Robert Leegte.
The language of the digital
Based on the work of Jan Robert Leegte
In Writing Degree Zero (1953), the semiotician Roland Barthes examines the formalism of language. He concentrates on the characteristics of language that go beyond those of a means of communication and a direct form of expression. Words become building blocks that recur in different constellations and with different meanings. Barthes is also the famous advocate of the metaphorical death of the author, which emancipates the (written) text beyond its author. In his view, a text is an object between sender and receiver and is therefore subject to various interpretations. After its creation, a text can acquire a more autonomous status that is separate from its creator. These two ideas have found expression in the visual arts, for example in the search for the specificity of the medium of painting in the 1950s and beyond. Here, artists set out to show a painting for what it is: nothing more than paint on canvas, without illusion. “Painting Degree Zero” even appears as a literal reference to Barthes in the practice of French artist Daniel Buren. The meaning of a cultural artifact shifts from a single meaning “intended” by the creator to a constantly changing field of meaning, a triangular relationship between creator, artwork and viewer.
In his practice, Jan Robert Leegte has been exploring the materiality of everyday digital and online environments and cultures since the 1990s. He strips the elements of these virtual realities of their original context and meaning. Like a semiotician of the digital age, he reduces the digital to a building block and explores the functioning of its various elements. In his ongoing series JPEG (from 2022), Leegte does not present the image as a JPEG, but the JPEG itself, as a compression process and image file type. And then there is the scroll bar, which has appeared in many contexts and forms in Leegte’s practice since 1997 – both in the virtual and the physical realm, as a website and as a sculpture. The scroll bar is a changing everyday object, like the individual words in Barthes’ analysis, which constantly takes on new meanings – and appearances – in different constellations. A cultural construction without an identifiable author. Words also exist outside the literary realm, just as the scroll bar – and the pixels or ones and zeros that compose it – functions outside the realm of art. The revelation of materiality and the stripping away of meaning again seem to be reserved for the realm of literature and art.
JPEG (0xc5475b50c18592d0ae), 2023, ChromaLuxe print in aluminium frame, 100 x 100 cm, Unique
courtesy the artist, OFFICE IMPART and Upstream Gallery
The comparison between language and digital art is often drawn; language is at the center of the digital realm through programming. But there are even more similarities: Both language and digital material have functions outside the artistic context, much more so than classical visual art forms such as painting. They are not primarily a means of artistic expression. They are primarily a means of communication that is explored and expanded through art, including visual art and literature. Or as Barthes puts it in Writing Degree Zero: “Literature is no longer experienced as a socially privileged medium of communication, but as a language of consistency, a language full of hidden depths that presents itself as both a dream and a threat. These words apply directly to digital art and Leegte’s practice. Digital means are not used here as a means of communication, but as a form of artistic expression, as a language with its own rules and laws. The utopian and dystopian aspects of the Internet, the communication medium that also functions as an artistic medium, also resonate in Barthes’ description.
Leegte searches for everyday objects and concepts in the digital realm and moves them to another realm – and vice versa. This “drag and drop” – words that have also gained in importance with the introduction of the virtual – creates a transformation from one semantic reality to another. By isolating digital elements, Leegte detaches them from their constantly changing environment and monumentalizes them in a silent way. Through the JPEG, the scroll bar, the button and the NFT, he takes the visitor on a journey through art historical references and methods. Leegte explores the digital as an artistic language that has myriad meanings in both physical and online reality.
Jan Robert Leegte (born 1973, Netherlands) is one of the first Dutch artists to work on and for the Internet since the 1990s. In 2002, he shifted his focus to the realization of digital materials in the context of the physical gallery space, attempting to bridge the world of online art and the world of gallery art by making prints, sculptures, installations, drawings and projections, drawing on historical movements such as Land Art, Minimalism, Performance Art and Conceptualism. As an artist, Leegte explores the position of new materials produced by the (networked) computer. Photoshop selection markers, scroll bars, Google Maps, code and software are dissected to understand their ontological nature. The networked computer is the central muse in my work, in which I explore all its wonders and idiosyncrasies. “I don’t use software to make art, I make art about software”.
Vernissage: Thursday, 05. September 2024, 6-9 pm
Exhibition period: Thursday, 05. September – Friday, 18. October 2024
Opening hours during Berlin Art Week: Wednesday – Saturday, 11. – 14. September 2024, 12-6 pm, and by appointment.
Bildunterschrift Titelbild: Selection, Exhibition views OFFICE IMPART, 2024, Courtesy the artist and OFFICE IMPART, Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza
Exhibition Jan Robert Leegte – Galerie OFFICE IMPART | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
