Exuberant colours, cadent sounds and dazzling lights manifest as an immersive environment. Retaining only the placebo of planarity, striking neon tones, gestural brush strokes and layered surfaces combine into mixed-media compositions. These deconstructed picture planes transcend the objecthood of artworks with the simplest of gestures: visible and audible wavelengths embrace the paintings, reverberate in unison and collide in the spectatorial perception. Citing his exhibition Techno Zen at the 60th Venice Biennale, Nemes continues to dissect sound frequencies into low, mid and high ranges, while dividing light information from the visible spectrum into three interwoven realms. Nemes, fascinated by pink not existing on the visible spectrum but resulting from the brain mixing colours, indirectly points to the subjective nature of perception and the brain’s role in constructing realities, highlighting reciprocity between physical phenomena and cognitive interpretation. Inspired by techno music and rave culture, Nemes explores sensory experiences through art.
The title, Nemes’ ars poetica, is rooted in the concept of manifestation and encapsulates the belief that internal states shape external realities: in order to attract what one desires, one must first embody those qualities – or alternatively express them through artistic language. Nemes urges primary and synthetic colours to compete for territorial dominance within the painting’s field. Geometry and colour become crucial subject matters, while techniques, like enamel, serve as an agency for content referencing art historical contexts. Genealogical shifts are traceable throughout the œuvre: Path Paintings descend from the aesthetic values constituted in Eclipse Paintings, both incorporating material richness, structural density and illusory depth. Laser-cut enamelled steel plates, powder-coated stainless steel, mirror plexiglass, acrylic, canvas and wood converge to address, assess and animate the inherent layeredness of traditional painting. This refined exaggeration of painterly strata continues in Synchronicity Paintings, where Nemes explores the digital realm by incorporating pervasive yet intrusive pixels. Inlaid LED screen fragments use additive colour mixing, in which red, green and blue sub-pixels generate light, echoing the biology of the human eye, where photoreceptor cells decipher RGB information to blend colours. Recalling the similarity of light-emitting diodes and cones in the eye, harsh, artificial light is set against the tactility of hand-painted or airbrushed canvas – a visual reminder of the subtle analogies between technological and natural worlds.
The interplay of lights, vision and sensory overload eventuate true synchronicity as Stereo Paintings sound harmonious musical compositions merging soft techno beats with spiritual instrumental music. Converging visual and acoustic experiences, the series invites deceleration by listening. Singular sound pieces derive from the topographical details of the paintings, whereby mapping minor differences in the elevation of the layers, data drawn from the tangible features of artworks feeds into a sound synthesis, where higher elevations and lower indentations are assigned to comparable pitches. Transmuted into acoustic properties, the painting now imbues space and subconsciously governs the contemplation of artworks on a sonant level. Ultimate perceptive syntheses arise through light from LED bars reflecting off the painterly surfaces and pulsating speakers of Stereo Paintings, and the surrounding white walls. Challenging the physical limitations of the picture plane by extending immaterial colour beyond its boundaries, age-old painterly knowledge is simulated in a dynamic and live act of colour mixing. Nemes celebrates the notional scopes between technology and nature, intentionality and intuition, techno subcultures and spirituality, and manifests a future where inner equilibrium emerges from a synthesis of forces and perceptions, perpetually renewing the core values and aesthetic qualities of painting.
– Hanna Claris
