Not me failing CAPTCHA again...
Our phones have become both our eyes and our brain. We see the world through them. Is my phone part of me? Am I real? Am I human? Is anything real?? Pascal Sender puts a digital POV on the canvas.
Pascal Sender: CAPTCHA 2826
Sender is a Millennial artist from Locarno who lives between Düsseldorf and London. He works a lot with painting and drawing, and the outcome is something along the lines of tech glitch meets acid meets radioactive mutation. It’s very much giving corecore. Instead of showing us the world through our phones and social media, he shows us what becoming one with our devices looks like.
On large canvases, he draws cityscapes that look like they have an AR filter on, prints screenshots of iPhones about to explode with notifications and tabs and adds pixelated drawings like those on Windows XP Paint. When looking at it, it’s … too much. But in a way that just makes sense. Being exposed to our phones 24/7 is a chaotic, messy experience, so why not show it that way?
Playing with digital and physical spaces
While our favorite billionaire-robot Mark is trying whatever he can to pull us more into the Metaverse and out of physical spaces, Sender considers how the way we see our surroundings has already changed. The paint on the canvas is thick and textured, unlike our flat, smooth screens. There is also an AR app you can download to see how the paintings come to life through the camera lens, moving into the exhibition space while being caught on a 9:16 screen. If you don’t have an iPhone (it’s okay, this is a safe space), you can also use a giant wooden hand holding an iPad with the AR app installed and roll around the exhibition, showing everyone how you are not like other girls. Palazzetto Tito, the venue of the exhibition, also finds its way into the paintings through small architectural details and photographs of the building that Sender made prior. It’s like an infinite mirror, where real and artificial space are two reflections infinitely repeating each other.
Please confirm that you are human
To enter some rooms and to see some special artworks, you have to complete an actual CAPTCHA that the artist developed. It's quite funny considering that AI is now much better at solving these tests than actual humans are.
What I enjoyed about this exhibition is that Sender does not make a moral statement about our fusion with the digital world. He just observes. In that sense, art is somewhat like memes: You become aware of something you relate to only after someone else observed it and pointed it out.
If you too want to make sure that you are still human, go complete some CAPTCHA at Pascal Sender: CAPTCHA 2826 at Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa inside Palazzetto Tito until July 16, 2023.
Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa
Palazzetto Tito
Fondamenta Gherardini, 2826
30123, Venezia VE, Italy
Open Wednesday until Sunday from 10.30 pm until 5.30 pm
Free entry
info@bevilacqualamasa.it
Thank you so much for reading my review. If you’d like to find out more of what’s going on in Venice’s art scene, subscribe to my substack and share this post.
See you soon!
Jennifer