Continuum Transfunctioner

The exhibition is the inaugural exhibition in the newly created KG Gate exhibition space, which profiles itself as a gallery primarily focused on virtual and digital art. Here, four artists present works that overlap between the platform of the material and digital worlds, attacking our ordinary material reality by breaking into new dimensions opened up in virtual space.

Julius Reichel presents a kind of anachronistic relativisation of the phenomenon of virtuality. His object titled Manual Network is a real manual object, a hand-made network that refers to string writing. Just as every artistic communication has its own code, the individual language of the artist, Julius creates his own communication system. Manual Network is in fact an artistic metalanguage. However, we can observe not only its physical form of revelation, but also its virtual alter ego, a 3D scan or projection. One cannot help but think of the very beginnings of conceptual art and Joseph Koshut's iconic One and Three Chairs. In this way, Julius, too, once again breaks down traditional notions of imagery. Thus, he presents us not only with the object itself, but also with its mediated form, in fact, a representation of a representation or message on the other.

Alexander Martsynyuk presents a digitally materialized object of a hybrid body, a human figure transformed into the form of an ant. However, the Kafkaesque theme of transformation is inevitably entwined with a network of topical connotations in the case of this Ukrainian-born artist. It touches upon the transformation of man in the time of the apocalypse, the destruction of forms of humanity, the metamorphosis of humanity, its fragility and vulnerability. The object, which was created thanks to the digital tools that materialize the virtual form of this sculpture, thus forms in the exhibition, in terms of technological genesis, a counterpart to Julius Reichl's objects, going in the opposite direction from the virtual to the material.

Radka Bodzewicz works with augmented reality tools. Thanks to the possibilities of the augmented reality medium, traditional painting is breaking free from the grip of matter. From traditional painting, limited by the material characteristics of this medium, a new dematerialised reality emerges with the help of nowadays readily available software. Painting enters space, claiming a third, and in the case of movement, a fourth dimension. Unlike virtual reality, however, we are still in contact with the world we know; the boundaries of illusion are precisely defined. And we have the opportunity to observe a poetic surreal revelation. An ephemeral object, a fleeting trace of a story almost real and yet non-existent, like walking on the edge of a dream.

The Italian artist Olia Svetlanova has gone furthest in immersing himself in the virtual world. In 2017, he was born as an avatar artist, stepping out of the role of author and reincarnating into a fluid being embedded in the world of virtual reality. Thus, not only the essence of his work, but the very essence of the artist is virtual. He works with CGI - computer-generated graphics - and is concerned with corporeality, its visual decomposition and rebirth. The perception of the body here is aesthetically close to Baroque paintings, when physicality was a mediator of mysticism, when everything was both unreal and more real than reality.

These four different creative positions, in which the fluid sands of the world familiar to us and its until recently traditional grasp in matter with the dimensionless and almost limitless digital space are missioned, are not only the first gallery probe into the field of virtual art presentation. But they also offer a close encounter with the work of progressive artists whose shared presence in this space is an expression of the dissolution of many boundaries.