Screen Strokes

Pequod Co. is pleased to present, as of June 21st, 2022, Screen Strokes, a curated group show by Janet40, with the participating artists: Raúl Aguilar Canela, Helena Garza, Luis Hidalgo, Sara Ludy, Sofie Ramos, Juan Manuel Salas and Bral Sorchini.

Since 2016, Janet40 has been dedicated to translating digital culture into artistic objects and to producing multi-format shows that facilitate its consumption near and far from the keyboard. Playing into the conservative game of exhibiting painting in a gallery, they wanted to bend a few rules.

They have ventured to evidence the debt that contemporary painting owes to what has been happening on the screen for over 20 years; from its consumption on our devices, through the use of software for its processing and the notion that, filters and digital effects (that once took painting as inspiration) are as real in our material environment as any pictorial gesture captured in a rectangular image container.

Tactile goes from either a phone, a tablet or a canvas. It’s all the same.

Their source for this show (fluctuating between pixel and brushstroke) is a selection of artists that are positioned between the Save As command, Winamp skins and app updates, and the need to add mass and volume to what you already feel in past tense; consumed by the gaze. They want to accompany pieces rarely shown in the city with practices that have been a source of inspiration for the artistic duo.

Janet40 believes in the indiscriminate use of tools that take us from one support to another, without fear of revealing their processes. They do not think that painting loses its mystery when its scaffolding is shown, but rather, it gains complexity when we think of it as part of the torrent of data of our daily life as users of networks.

“We have said it before and we will say it again, this exchange and even plundering of visual data between supports is what builds reality today. We imagine contemporary painting having an affair with the screen when no one is watching. Only this time, we open the door without knocking and take a picture of it.”

— Pequod Co.