| George Lawson: Chris Ashley’s HTML Drawings Chris Ashley is a painter. That’s the first thing I want to say, and as it may turn out, the most radical, because he creates his color images without paint. Ashley uses HTML (hypertext markup language), the original and rudimentary instructional software of the internet, and delivers the results to his audience via the web. No brushes to clean. No walls to leave nail holes in. His studio/gallery is, in the parlance, a Blog, an online journal he maintains on a day to day basis. As a typical viewer, my experience with his work is quite a bit more intimate than it would be in a gallery setting, checking in every few days as I do, usually curled up in bed with a laptop, to find out what’s new in this 24/7 digital version of Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley’s agile, leaping sensibility, and if I’ve been away for a week, it’s generally quite a feed, for every day brings a new image. Ashley creates his art through coded instruction, simple commands that give his rectangles hue, width and breadth, and determine their location relative to one another. His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist—he builds his grid-bound images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The result is organic: a kind of cluster, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. He feels his way into the color, and into the broader implications of his task. The daily offerings unfold serially, usually around a conceptual theme cued in by the title. A week’s worth gives one the chance to see the development of Ashley’s running idea and to consider the relationship between his formally constrained abstraction and the narrative reference he extends by association. It is in this timely accumulation, with images so easily archived and cross-referenced, that Ashley finds the real strength of his medium. There are philosophical implications to the virtual reality, the non-physical aspect of these HTML images. Rather than painting, one might call them coding, and one could ask angel-on-a-pinhead questions like, “What direction is the light coming from?” and, “How big are they?” They don’t conform to painting’s standard vocabulary, deriving their color as they do neither from mass tone nor undertone. For the many ways they are different from painting, though, what seems to differentiate the actual experience of viewing them most is their convenience, how readily accessed they are. Considered as paintings, Ashley’s images conjure the same pros and cons compared to physical objects as emails do compared to handwritten letters. What digital correspondence lacks in the perfumed, autograph, keepsake department, it makes up for in its running immediacy, and the same holds true for the generative nature of Ashley’s art, lending itself as it does to published output with its own built-in currency. A visit to Ashley’s blog always feels like late breaking news. Traditional painting, by its static nature, has a way of arresting and stretching time. Images unfold according to inner clocks. By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a way to introduce even more plasticity into painting’s inherent ability to manipulate time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism. Since the pioneering days of the internet, creatives have described the challenges of making online art as “designing on water. ” Ashley seems perfectly at home with the flux of his medium, with colors that shift from monitor to monitor and an oeuvre that consists at its core of nothing but electronically stored chains of zeroes and ones. Whether or not his art conforms in fact to any conventional definition of painting, his artistry, its intent and application, is very much in keeping with the highest standards of the painter. The simple language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter’s vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms and uses this freedom to imbue his work with fresh meaning, extending the vernacular and experiential impact of constructivism. In spite of their classical roots, these are subtly tuned and freshly spawned works. The substantive value of Ashley’s imagery will outlive any novelty value that his working in HTML carries. He never forgets that his true medium is color and light, and he wields these basics with a deftness any painter would envy. By whatever means, he paints. In the process, and through the accumulative context within which he frames his work, he breaks down the false dichotomy between formal structure and narrative content, creating an art which is as rewarding to ponder as it is to view. George
Lawson |