'New Playground'
Quote from CohentheWriter on 29. April 2022, 2:58Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/permanent-collection?collection=0xb932a70a57673d89f4acffbe830e8ed7f75fb9e0&token=16385&page=2
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/%27new-playground%27-16385
Date Minted: November 19, 2020
Artist Description: A playful setting carefully balancing between Art History and VR shapes. Straws and cannonballs. Horse and Bull. And a Hand trying to catch it all when all control is lost. Feel free to zoom in and discover all the little elements this ‘playground' is built from.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Rutger van der Tas is not interested in your petty reality. Nor mine. “When I create I float in a timeless environment with no boundaries only playful options,” he says in his bio. “I tend to drown myself in lines, forms and colors trying to capture something that's not there.” That much is clear. Take a look at van der Tas’ larger oeuvre, and you’re confronted with a hodgepodge of surrealist and abstractionist imagery. This is an artist interested in dreamscape-inspired artistry, in absurdities, and in some super-logic being imposed upon the logic of reality, which he seems bored by, if only artistically. His oeuvre showcases a hyped-up reality, where faces have been broken down into elements, where incredible creatures emerge haphazardly from within the bodies of others, where an object’s similarities to a certain understood object or thing are offset by deliberately confounding details and variables which turn it, and everything else van der Tas makes, into a completely original, hardly conceivable product.
Like New Playground, for instance, the fully-interactive 3-D piece that only becomes less intelligible the longer and closer you look at it. That’s ironic in and of itself, what with how these interactive pieces, at least those I’ve seen, have traditionally used their interactivity to allow observers to get a better sense of the technical artistry, of the items within, of textures and colors and exactitudes and such. In New Playground, we have none of that. Van der Tas describes New Playground as “A playful setting carefully balancing between Art History and VR shapes.” To that end, he’s created a mostly horizontal sequence of unrelated objects, placed them near and around each other, and clothed them in abstract skins. We have a mahogany stick stuck straight into the “ground.” We have a floating, abstract-expressionist hoop that hovers around it. There are candy-cane-like appendages. There are small black-and-silver marbles hovering in the air. There’s a reductionist version of a Bull, tiny and horned, sure, but without other coherent features, just painted over in black tones and Pollack-like splotches of color. An indescribable black shape stands stolidly somewhere near the middle of the image; on it are plastered images which appear to be segments of classic Greco-Roman sculpture. There’s a tube. There’s something with three-legs and a flame decal. There’s more than that too —shapes, colors, associations–—but as you describe more and more, New Playground becomes harder and harder to quantify.
Looking through van der Tas’ oeuvre, we see a real evolution in the kinds of subjects and styles that interest him. Early on, van der Tas is mostly interested, or caged in by, portraiture. So many of these early pieces focus on the human face, or human facial features. Rarely are they without the artist’s surrealist touches, but it’s clear his interest in exploring human form. As his works move towards the contemporary, however, the artist leaves behind human form in favor of true surrealism. Colors and collage become dominant. When portraits are played with at all, they flout the human form in the first place, either screwing up recognizable humanity beyond measure or clouding faces in obfuscating colors. New Playground is a relatively contemporary piece, one in which the artist seems to have mostly moved past an exploration of recognizable forms and has ventured fully into the abstract. Texture is obviously important. Shape, but shape without description. These images are post-logic, deeply experimental and deeply personal, and because of this, are all very very interesting.
Ditto New Playground. There are experiences and memories and recognitions baked into the fabric of this piece, though the artist provides us no lens with which to understand them. We know there are elements of art history here —the classical Sculpture, the abstract-expressionist colors, the quasi-cubist reconstruction of the bull, for instance— but they are veiled in the way they are expressed. Van der Tas is a degree-d art historian, mind you, so we must assume he has a deep familiarity with the past, and thus all the renderings captured here are likely deliberate. Nevertheless, things we might recognize —colors and techniques— are imposed on forms that we can’t fully describe, and so the uppermost limit of these historical art movements are revealed when they abutt the ability of modern, machine-inflected art to peddle in forms the human mind cannot singularly compose, construct, or compute.
The human mind, after all, is only capable of imagining things a certain distance from reality. Psychologically, humans cannot even imagine human faces they have not seen before, for instance. But I see in New Playground the same impetus for boundary-pushing that I believe has been instrumental in the rise of Generative art. There’s a desire in all of this cutting-edge art to use computers to conceive of things we humans can’t do alone. Computers, after all, have their own ability to be deeply creative, just in ways humans currently cannot. New Playground as a piece of art makes good on its title not just in the actual objects the image shows us, but in the underlying technology that allows those objects to exist. It’s not just that the “playground” is a new construction of the artist’s, it’s a new construction for all artists, using technology to promote a surrealism, an absurdism, and an abstractionism that simply was not possible until very recently. It’s new all right. And we might not fully understand it. Does the artist? Does it matter?
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/%27new-playground%27-16385
Date Minted: November 19, 2020
Artist Description: A playful setting carefully balancing between Art History and VR shapes. Straws and cannonballs. Horse and Bull. And a Hand trying to catch it all when all control is lost. Feel free to zoom in and discover all the little elements this ‘playground' is built from.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Rutger van der Tas is not interested in your petty reality. Nor mine. “When I create I float in a timeless environment with no boundaries only playful options,” he says in his bio. “I tend to drown myself in lines, forms and colors trying to capture something that's not there.” That much is clear. Take a look at van der Tas’ larger oeuvre, and you’re confronted with a hodgepodge of surrealist and abstractionist imagery. This is an artist interested in dreamscape-inspired artistry, in absurdities, and in some super-logic being imposed upon the logic of reality, which he seems bored by, if only artistically. His oeuvre showcases a hyped-up reality, where faces have been broken down into elements, where incredible creatures emerge haphazardly from within the bodies of others, where an object’s similarities to a certain understood object or thing are offset by deliberately confounding details and variables which turn it, and everything else van der Tas makes, into a completely original, hardly conceivable product.
Like New Playground, for instance, the fully-interactive 3-D piece that only becomes less intelligible the longer and closer you look at it. That’s ironic in and of itself, what with how these interactive pieces, at least those I’ve seen, have traditionally used their interactivity to allow observers to get a better sense of the technical artistry, of the items within, of textures and colors and exactitudes and such. In New Playground, we have none of that. Van der Tas describes New Playground as “A playful setting carefully balancing between Art History and VR shapes.” To that end, he’s created a mostly horizontal sequence of unrelated objects, placed them near and around each other, and clothed them in abstract skins. We have a mahogany stick stuck straight into the “ground.” We have a floating, abstract-expressionist hoop that hovers around it. There are candy-cane-like appendages. There are small black-and-silver marbles hovering in the air. There’s a reductionist version of a Bull, tiny and horned, sure, but without other coherent features, just painted over in black tones and Pollack-like splotches of color. An indescribable black shape stands stolidly somewhere near the middle of the image; on it are plastered images which appear to be segments of classic Greco-Roman sculpture. There’s a tube. There’s something with three-legs and a flame decal. There’s more than that too —shapes, colors, associations–—but as you describe more and more, New Playground becomes harder and harder to quantify.
Looking through van der Tas’ oeuvre, we see a real evolution in the kinds of subjects and styles that interest him. Early on, van der Tas is mostly interested, or caged in by, portraiture. So many of these early pieces focus on the human face, or human facial features. Rarely are they without the artist’s surrealist touches, but it’s clear his interest in exploring human form. As his works move towards the contemporary, however, the artist leaves behind human form in favor of true surrealism. Colors and collage become dominant. When portraits are played with at all, they flout the human form in the first place, either screwing up recognizable humanity beyond measure or clouding faces in obfuscating colors. New Playground is a relatively contemporary piece, one in which the artist seems to have mostly moved past an exploration of recognizable forms and has ventured fully into the abstract. Texture is obviously important. Shape, but shape without description. These images are post-logic, deeply experimental and deeply personal, and because of this, are all very very interesting.
Ditto New Playground. There are experiences and memories and recognitions baked into the fabric of this piece, though the artist provides us no lens with which to understand them. We know there are elements of art history here —the classical Sculpture, the abstract-expressionist colors, the quasi-cubist reconstruction of the bull, for instance— but they are veiled in the way they are expressed. Van der Tas is a degree-d art historian, mind you, so we must assume he has a deep familiarity with the past, and thus all the renderings captured here are likely deliberate. Nevertheless, things we might recognize —colors and techniques— are imposed on forms that we can’t fully describe, and so the uppermost limit of these historical art movements are revealed when they abutt the ability of modern, machine-inflected art to peddle in forms the human mind cannot singularly compose, construct, or compute.
The human mind, after all, is only capable of imagining things a certain distance from reality. Psychologically, humans cannot even imagine human faces they have not seen before, for instance. But I see in New Playground the same impetus for boundary-pushing that I believe has been instrumental in the rise of Generative art. There’s a desire in all of this cutting-edge art to use computers to conceive of things we humans can’t do alone. Computers, after all, have their own ability to be deeply creative, just in ways humans currently cannot. New Playground as a piece of art makes good on its title not just in the actual objects the image shows us, but in the underlying technology that allows those objects to exist. It’s not just that the “playground” is a new construction of the artist’s, it’s a new construction for all artists, using technology to promote a surrealism, an absurdism, and an abstractionism that simply was not possible until very recently. It’s new all right. And we might not fully understand it. Does the artist? Does it matter?