It starts off with a conversation between Kolaj contributor Edvard Derkert and his friend Gunnar, a painter in his late fifties working in a sort of abstract expressionistic style. They talk about two different pieces that have a lot in common, at least visually. But something is confronting both works and their creators’ ideas. They are comparing a painting and a digital collage.
What Gunnar saw on the screen on my laptop he found unreal. Not real in the sense of realistic. Like photorealism. Unreal, because of the fact that there is nothing to touch, no smell of turpentine, just pixels on a screen!
This conversation must be seen as a pretext, a starting point for Derkert to elaborate on the perception and legitimacy of digital collage using unexpected detours and colorful analogies.
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Image: Dirty Abstraction by Edvard Derkert
(digital collage; 2010)