Apple and the eye
Armed with an infrared pen and track pad, Karl Gustav is bringing a new edge to digital art and showing that the medium is nothing to be afraid of, writes Oliver Roberts
SOMETIMES, an artist’s name is as memorable as his art. Picasso. Matisse. Klimt. Giacometti. Jumping syllables, a collection of letters that have become famous shapes in the corners of their work.
Karl Gustav. It’s a good name. It’s somewhat harsh at its beginning, that K announcing itself so abruptly, but after that there’s a tongue roll, followed by the guttural G, then a quick rounded hum, and the airy flourish of the final syllable. It looks like it should be written as one word — Karlgustav. The name of a Polish vodka or a defunct Russian state. Exotic. Secretive.
The first time I see Gustav is at an exhibition of his work at Art Eye Gallery in Fourways, Joburg. He’s wearing a black leather kilt. His top half is relatively normal, his eyes very blue.
Gustav is a new-media artist who is unafraid to admit that his canvas includes a Mac and Photoshop, his palette an infrared pen and graphic tablet. I say unafraid because as soon as someone starts producing art on a computer, there are people who think it’s fake. There are people who think it’s easy, and that it lacks soul.
It would take a stony-hearted art historian to say that the work hanging on the walls at Art Eye, and at Gustav’s home in Bryanston, lacks expression. In fact, there is one piece in his studio, a simple sketch of a man’s face turned towards the viewer, which one gallery owner asked to be removed after a few days in her shop because it was making her cry. It was drawn on Photoshop.
“I once had person say to me, ‘I can do that as well,’” Gustav says. “He got a copy of Photoshop and came back a month later to apologise. You can have Rembrandt himself teaching you how to use oils but if you can’t envision that image . . .”
Many of Gustav’s works are not comfortable to look at. Some are simply uneasy on the eye because we’re not used to seeing pixels on a painting. Others are scratchy, raw, scribbled. A lot of pieces show solitary figures seemingly lost and iso- lated, overpowered by the immense space surrounding them. Sad, blackened eyes and mournful tilts of the head. Titles like A Changed Man ; Ailing Child; Detached; Despair; In Absentia; and, inevitably, The Human Condition.
The struggles and conflicts expressed in much of Gustav’s work are the result of his own history. He was born into a very conservative farming community in the Free State and his dreams of becoming a concert pianist were thwarted by his father who told him to go and study something proper. So Gustav got a Masters in psychology, worked at a university for a while, did a computer programming course, became a systems engineer and was very good at it but hated it, got married, came out of the closet, got divorced, and then left everything and went to Australia for six months in the early ’90s, carrying a laptop and a camera. Here, he began combining his natural artistic abilities with photograph manipulation, then experimenting on basic computer drawing programs like Paint.
“I had to tackle all these issues that, coming from a conservative community, I never had to tackle before,” says Gustav. “All the wheels came off. I got divorced, which is not done. I came out of the closet, which is not done. And I quit my corporate job, which is also not done. You think you can go through life manipulating things but it catches up with you eventually. Then truthful living comes.”
Gustav had his first solo exhibition in Rosebank in 2003. He has since exhibited internationally, including in Dubai, at the Miami River Art Fair, in Monaco and in the Netherlands. During that time he has experimented with different ways of printing his pieces, recently combining canvas and plexiglass for a layered effect.
“I think I will never reach the end of experimentation because my medium develops so rapidly that it often feels like you’re always starting something,” he says. “It’s like doing a degree in digital tech today — by the time you’ve finished your third year, the stuff you learnt in your first year is obsolete. You’re continually a first-year student.”
Unusually for an artist, Gustav uses both sides of his brain to express himself. His background in computer programming and a profound interest in mathematics add intriguing elements to his work. His fixation with Johann Sebastian Bach’s infinite loops, MC Escher’s recurring events and Kurt Gödel’s incomplete mathematics led Gustav to create a series of works entitled Qaerendo Invenietis in which he played around with the non-repetition of sequences. Qaerendo Invenietis is Latin for “By seeking, you will discover”.
Gustav shows me how he works. He brings up a piece in progress on screen and, using the infrared pen and track pad, he opens up layers, drags one thing into another, selects different tools, different brush strokes, zooms in, zooms out, isolates, cuts, pastes. It’s the modern human gesture — tapping and dragging fingers across a screen with an increasing dexterity. This is our reality now. The screen is our world. I look through one of Gustav’s notebooks — conceptual drawings, canvas measurements, ideas. He still sketches with a pencil sometimes, but spends 80% of his time with the track pad.
Gustav’s next evolution is to incorporate 3D printing into his work. He envisages body parts, a head, a shoulder, jutting out from the canvas. His calls this idea an “application”.
Perhaps some people are wary of digital art because its essentially data from a hard disk, printed onto canvas. It can be reproduced exactly, at will, and stored for eternity on a microchip. Gustav is aware of this and this is why he only ever prints one copy of a piece. This makes artistic, as well as business sense. No artist, except perhaps for Tretchikoff, wants to be mass produced.
This month, a meeting will be held with the aim of establishing an association for new-media artists. It’s the first step towards recognising digital art as an official movement in South Africa, something real and important.
However, we mustn’t start worrying that all this technological malarkey is going to ruin art as we know it. When the camera was invented, Picasso said he had to find new ways of painting. One wonders what he would have done if he’d been handed an iPad and told he could draw anything he wanted, in any colour, with any paint and brush texture he desired, anywhere, by simply tapping and tracing his finger across a screen. LS