In his new series of work, Kristian Touborg is combining painting as classic medium and digital tools and synthetic products to explore the field between figuration and abstraction, between oil paint and digital models, between original and copy, between painter and algorithm. To Touborg, digital tools are artificially generated and enhanced parts of his painterly consciousness.

Fragments of Touborg’s own paintings, as well as details from works by Munch and Gauguin are not so much treated as quotes as they are source material. Together with these fragments, digitally rendered and printed onto synthetic fabrics, iPhone snapshots from his own vacations make up the basic figurative elements of Touborg's works. They allude to some kind of narrative, but only reveal glimpses that fade and merge into dreamlike scenes on the border between coherent and fleetingly illusive. Surfaces coloured in dusky blues and deep purples; in mother-of-pearl and splashes of bright neon, they drag the identifiable motifs in the direction of abstraction and creates open fields on the surfaces of the works.

Issues of borrowing, stealing and copyrights are central to Touborg in his works that consist of both painterly effort and industrially produced and processed visual material collaged into the works. Figuration and Algorithms make up a cultural mesh, or perhaps even a mess, through which private memories, the negotiation of artistic intention and creativity, as well as the algorithmic prioritising of our online presence is filtered.

Kristian Touborg (b. 1987) lives and works in Copenhagen. He holds a master’s degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, Copenhagen. Figuration and Algorithms is his second solo show at Galerie Mikael Andersen.

Photo credits: Jan Søndergaard