Timur Si-Qin, Axe Effect (detail), 2011, wooden shield, Axe body wash, 17 3/4 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8". From the series “Axe Effect,” 2011–. From “Grouped Show,” 2011, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.

At once feeding back into the white walls of the gallery and rendering them more easily photographable for instantaneous distribution onto a scrolling surface, the screen brackets the gallery space from both sides. And it already has for some years now. Such fluorescent-lighting systems became ubiquitous in galleries in the mid- to late 2000s, at the same time that galleries began systematically posting images of their exhibitions on their websites. The iPhone, and the smartphones and website designs that have proliferated in its image, has also created the conditions of possibility for another spatial transformation: the dispersal of galleries away from specific neighborhoods, away even from temporary ones such as the fair, so that a geographic sprawl that began in the ’70s culminates in a truly decentralized network, the spaces getting brighter the farther they are from the exploded center.

WHILE THE CASUAL LINKS may never be precisely determined, the recent history of the IPS screen in all its manifestations is clearly inseparable from the “real-life” experience of the gallery and its contents. And these contents are surprisingly regular, a regularity located solely on the register of visual effects. In 2011, at least two trends crystallized around galleries closely linked to the iPhone-aggregator distribution system. These trends—which have, in the meantime, become strikingly pervasive—are two sides of the same coin. The first is a mania for paintings in unsaturated pastels, off-whites, and especially grays. The second, more visible in sculpture, can be encapsulated by a return to the Surrealist object, in which jarring juxtapositions are made in hues that tend toward neon. The paintings have most often been described as “antigestural” or “subtractive”; the objects are usually described, again in relatively vague terms, as “post-Net” or “meme” art. The absence of a coherent discourse around the works, particularly in print media, is fitting, since it is precisely those channels of distribution that the works are designed to bypass.

The two tropes were illustrated early on in a pair of group shows held successively at Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin in the summer of 2011: “The Confidence Man,” curated by Gianni Jetzer, and “Grouped Show,” curated by Robert O. Fitzpatrick. These are, admittedly, selective examples—but they are nonetheless telling, not only because the aggregative function of the group-show format seems emblematic of the moment but also because the meaning of any trend can be best understood by analyzing the aggregate rather than the isolated practice. Most important, perhaps: I have only seen these exhibitions on Contemporary Art Daily, not in person.

In “The Confidence Man,” we saw a predominance of paintings in tones of marbleized white (Pavel Büchler), pastel (Dan Rees), and gray (Fredrik Vaerslev). In late 2010, probably under the influence of the work of Sergej Jensen and Michael Krebber, Vaerslev began making a series of allover scatter paintings that resemble terrazzo tiles or drop cloths, an early example of which was shown in the exhibition. But his work only hints at the astonishing number of gray and gray-brown paintings produced in the past few years, coming out of very different trajectories and locales.

Several features of this trend explain its prevalence within these specific media-technological conditions. First, the warm, low-contrast gray-brown tones of these paintings are an ideal foil for the cold colors and high contrast of both the iPhone IPS screen and its simulation via the fluorescent lights of the gallery. Gray actually dims the diodes on the screen, creating a zone of relief for eyes exposed to the full brightness of the white display ground. Second, the paintings generally employ an allover distribution of marks, eliciting a form of unfocus in the eyes—an update of Jackson Pollock’s allover “mirage.” And if such works are designed to be encountered within a vertical flow of images, passing in front of our eyes at ever faster rates through smartphone scrolling mechanisms, then such unfocus takes on a particular function. Through the vertical scroll, the eye is trained to rapidly target relevant data in a noisy stream of images. In some sense, Vaerslev’s gray paintings manifest this noise within their very frames. As an undifferentiated mixture of all other colors, gray-brown is highly entropic, providing precisely no information at all. In other words, they are “gray noise.”

But such inattention also momentarily releases the eye from its pattern-seeking movements. As the eye is required ever more finely to isolate (and, of course, monetize) information, to filter signal from noise, this particular form of noise seduces through its very lack of information, the painting reprising the conditions of its distribution in a visually therapeutic form. What is particularly interesting about this trend is the affective response it induces in the viewer. Collapsing information with affect, the absence of information is, in this case, also the absence of affect. Or rather, a reduction of affect to its zero degree, inducing in the viewer a state of relaxation that counters the anxiety fed by the speed of the scroll interface, slowing the eye down and dilating the pupils.