David Hunt
Remix after Kusama, Takashi, Boticcelli and Picasso
oil on canvas - 140 x 300 cm (3 x 140 x 100 cm)
This image wasn’t meant to exist. It started as pixels - something flickering, disposable, lost in the endless scroll-down. Then I made it slow. Painfully slow. Oil paint, stretched, smeared, made to behave like a glitch trapped in amber. A digital file pretending to be a masterpiece, pretending to be important. But is it? Or is it just another remix, another Botticelli deepfake, another over processed, over filtered, hallucination? "Unmasking Content : Exploring the Transition from Digital to Physical" In the digital world, the image often masks the content itself. While digital media constantly surrounds us, we tend to focus more on the medium—the transient qualities of screens and interfaces—rather than the content being presented. By transitioning digital content back into physical form through oil painting, I aim to allow the content to emerge in a more tangible and visible way. This process reflects the ongoing, fluid nature of the digital-to-physical shift, one that happens continuously in our daily lives but often goes unnoticed. My work becomes a metaphor for this subtle, pervasive transformation, where content is in a perpetual state of remixing, constantly reshaped by both digital and physical forces. Through this exploration, I seek to highlight how these transitions shape our understanding of content and our engagement with a world increasingly mediated by both digital and physical realities. Google estimates there are approximately 14.3 trillion images in the world today, and counting. My work exists as a response to this overwhelming visual flood, to the merging and overlapping of the physical and digital worlds. Art used to be about meaning. Now it’s about looking good on a screen. That’s fine. I like screens. They’re shiny. They move fast. They don’t ask questions. Kusama left her dots, Takashi left his candy coloured chaos, Picasso left his broken faces, Botticelli left his goddesses. I just mashed them all up together, turned up the saturation and let the image decide what it wanted to be. Maybe that’s what art is now - just whatever survives the compression. A Renaissance painting. A pop art spectacle. A corrupted jpeg. It’s all the same. The original has already gone. And that’s kind of beautiful. Yeats : A terrible beauty is born
My interpretation of this painting leans toward the concept of disintegration and reconstruction, mirroring the chaos and fluidity of digital and physical boundaries. The blurred figures and the streaks of motion evoke a sense of distortion, as though these people are fragmented images—caught in the process of becoming something else, just as digital data is constantly shifting and transforming. The overlapping movement of the bodies, together with the intense red tones and circular light patterns, suggests a digital overlay, where the figures are in a sort of dance between the virtual and the physical, unable to fully commit to either. The figures themselves are both fragmented and frozen, which hints at how our perception of identity and content is often fragmented and temporary in the digital age. The red background and glowing yellow lights—reminiscent of a digital interface or a distorted screen—add to the sense of both attraction and alienation. The body, in motion but not fully resolved, could be interpreted as a metaphor for how human identity and interaction are increasingly mediated by technology, often abstracted or diluted into pixels, yet still yearned for in its physical form. Overall, this piece feels like it’s asking questions about our relationship with our own presence in both the physical and digital worlds—how do we maintain our identity, our form, when we’re constantly being remixed, compressed, and recontextualized by digital forces? What remains of us when the original is gone?
Portraits - People and avatars
This image wasn’t meant to exist. It started as pixels - something flickering, disposable, lost in the endless scroll-down. Then I made it slow. Painfully slow. Oil paint, stretched, smeared, made to behave like a glitch trapped in amber. A digital file pretending to be a masterpiece, pretending to be important. But is it? Or is it just another remix, another Botticelli deepfake, another over processed, over filtered, hallucination? "Unmasking Content : Exploring the Transition from Digital to Physical" In the digital world, the image often masks the content itself. While digital media constantly surrounds us, we tend to focus more on the medium—the transient qualities of screens and interfaces—rather than the content being presented. By transitioning digital content back into physical form through oil painting, I aim to allow the content to emerge in a more tangible and visible way. This process reflects the ongoing, fluid nature of the digital-to-physical shift, one that happens continuously in our daily lives but often goes unnoticed. My work becomes a metaphor for this subtle, pervasive transformation, where content is in a perpetual state of remixing, constantly reshaped by both digital and physical forces. Through this exploration, I seek to highlight how these transitions shape our understanding of content and our engagement with a world increasingly mediated by both digital and physical realities. Google estimates there are approximately 14.3 trillion images in the world today, and counting. My work exists as a response to this overwhelming visual flood, to the merging and overlapping of the physical and digital worlds. Art used to be about meaning. Now it’s about looking good on a screen. That’s fine. I like screens. They’re shiny. They move fast. They don’t ask questions. Kusama left her dots, Takashi left his candy coloured chaos, Picasso left his broken faces, Botticelli left his goddesses. I just mashed them all up together, turned up the saturation and let the image decide what it wanted to be. Maybe that’s what art is now - just whatever survives the compression. A Renaissance painting. A pop art spectacle. A corrupted jpeg. It’s all the same. The original has already gone. And that’s kind of beautiful. Yeats : A terrible beauty is born
Google estimates there areapproximately 14.3 trillion images in the world today, and counting. My work exists as a response to this overwhelming visual flood, to the merging and overlapping of the physical and digital worlds.
Whether it's a digital file or a photograph, things happen very fast, they are fragments in time. Painting exists outside time, slowly. Oil paint, stretched, smeared, made to behave like a glitch trapped in amber.
These paintings are part of a series that weren't meant to exist. They started life as pixels - something
flickering, disposable, lost in the endless scroll-down. Selfies, Bodies, Bloodbaths, Holiday Pics on Instagram.
A digital file can pretend to be a masterpiece, to be important. But is it? Or is it just another remix, another 'Vemeeresque' deepfake, a processed filtered hallucination? Maybe that’s what art is now - whatever survives the compression.
A Renaissance painting. A pop art spectacle. A corrupted jpeg …..all the same. The original has already gone.
And that’s kind of beautiful.
Yeats: A terrible beauty is born.
