Visual artist Bart Stolle (Eeklo, 1974) lives and works in Brussels.
With his works, he explores not only the usual artistic expressions such as paintings, drawings, animation films, sound, but also more eclectic forms. In his work, he traces the similarities and differences between the calculating logic and ‘speed’ of the computer and the natural suppleness and slowness of the human mind. Central to this is the translation from one ‘world’ to the ‘other’.
Already in his 2011 ‘Low Fixed Media Show’ at Antwerp’s Zeno X gallery, he tried to expose the differences between AI and human intelligence through his abstract paintings.
Stolle clearly does not want to make digital art, but seeks to infiltrate the virtual world with his human mind.
To illustrate: through a complex combination of algorithms, a computer is able to create roughly 2,000 paintings in one second. Stolle seeks the analogue answer to this lightning-fast virtual world in slowing down. In the serenity of the moment and the attention paid to every square millimetre of the work, a work of art arises that may not be perfect according to the laws of digital logic, but does speak for the power and functioning of the human mind.
Stolle himself puts it this way: ‘Rhythm, melody, colour, stillness, movement, explosion, are universal elements to reflect on our understanding of time, of theof the space that surrounds us’. In all his works, the artist sets up contradictions: between analogue and virtual, chance and calculation, movement and stasis, the craft and the virtual, the manual and the mechanical.
In concrete terms, this means: Against the automatically generated drawings of a plotter, he places handmade drawings and paintings, every line, every colour of which, at a specific moment in time, has been brought to fruition, personal and unique. With his ‘translation process’ of digital data into colour and composition, stillness and movement, Stolle thus makes elements such as space and rhythm tangible. Think of the grooves of an LP. They all look identical, but when playing the LP, each groove turns out to be different and ‘individual’.
In this variety in apparent sameness lies the strength of Stolle’s work.
By way of conclusion, following rapt observation from art critic Mark Ruyters: ‘To me, Bart Stolle is an artist who turns computer-generated imagery into paintings. His ‘Low Fixed Media Show at Zeno X’ was a virtuoso series of works in which ‘cold’ dots, lines, stripes, squares, spheres and rectangles seem to have stepped right out of the computer language, to transform themselves in a subtle organic way into ‘warm’, haunting painting and drawing.’
Stolle is not a test case with his exhibition at Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche.
He has had solo exhibitions at Zeno X Gallery, CONVENT Art Space in Ghent, Ryan Lee Gallery in New York, the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, Josilda da Conceição Gallery, Amsterdam and STUK in Leuven. He has participated in group exhibitions at MUHKA in Antwerp, the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Prague, Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, LazniaCentre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, De Loketten van het Vlaams Parlement in Brussels, Coup de Ville in Sint-Niklaas, De Warande in Turnhout, art centre BUDA in Kortrijk, Telic Gallery in Los Angeles, Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, among others.