Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel’s site-specific installation Photoshop CS: 1060 by 2744 Centimeters, 10 DPC, RGB, Square Pixels, Default Gradient “Spectrum,” Mousedown y=1800 x=6800, Mouseup y=8800 x=20180, 2015, is a wave that disseminates the full spectrum of Photoshop’s color gradient by way of a two-hundred-square-meter carpet designed by the artist for a room in this twelfth-century palazzo. This is the first time the artist has placed work in a historical context, therefore the reflection on the obsolescence of technologies, which his Pop investigations usually involve, here acquires a tone of meditative concentration.

Along the walls, Arcangel has arranged works that belong to the sculpture series “Screen-Agers, Tall Boys, and Whales” and “Lakes,” both 2011–15. The carpet, part of his “Photoshop Gradient Demonstration” series from 2007–15, connects the different pieces that make up this show, titled “This Is All So Crazy, Everybody Seems So Famous.” Elsewhere, the floating-cloud backgrounds from a Super Mario video game, Super Mario Clouds, 2002, appear near a fresco depicting Saint George, inspiring questions about which iconic images endure and which evaporate over time. Moreover, the frescoes, which were completed throughout different historical periods, have now become faded fragments of their former glory. The exhibition inevitably invites a comparison between these relics of different eras and the different velocities of their consumption and decay. There is a collision here between the rapid decline of the image, its relevance in our society of technological consumption, and the slow time of history—and between artifacts that become old and nostalgic and those that are ancient or could become so.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.