PARIS.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko is presenting Iterative Fantasies, Mark Frygell’s second solo-exhibition with the gallery and the first one in Paris. The exhibition runs through October 15.
Mark Frygell has a practice deeply rooted in the history of painting, sub-cultural images and cartoons. He repeatedly manipulates and reworks gestures, references and materials, inspired by different methodologies of painting. His main interest lies in concepts such as caricature, the grotesque and the comic. With powerful brush strokes and thick layers of oil paint spread over mainly fairly large canvases he creates powerful yet ambiguous images.
In mathematics and computer science, iteration is a standard element of algorithms. It literally means repetition and is a problem-solving technique applied developing artificial intelligence. For each attempt to solve a problem, it learns something and creates a memory of it, upon which another attempt is added. This design of learning is not random but modelled upon what we know of human learning processes. Learning by doing and repetition as the mother of learning.
Frygell’s recent paintings are based on sketches, which in turn are based on images generated by artificial intelligence, AI,(vqgan+clip). He invents a title - like Refugee Bankers or Oasis - which the AIthen generates a great number of different images from. They are all wrong and incomplete, figuratively illogical but innovative as figuration. He works on a multitude of images, some then become the basis of paintings.
This technology is almost a human self-portrait. All the years I have spent trying to sort and synthesize my own visual memory is fascinatingly similar to how this intelligence is developing. It cannot see reality. “This is a cat” or “This is a car”, is information we have given it, all this data comes from humans. So what we call AI is less of an intelligence and more a representation of our collective subconscious.
Still, it is the process of painting that is the most important to me. It is not unlike the iterations, where I never look back, never redo, I constantly move forward. I rarely think in terms of what a painting represents or means, it is in many ways a stranger to me – partly my individual psychology, partly collective unconscious as expressed by the AI – it’s a hybrid fantasy.
Mark Frygell, July 2022
Mark Frygell is born in 1985 in Umeå, Sweden and lives and works in Stockholm. He holds an MFA from the Umeå Academy of Fine Art and has also spent a year at the Akademie der bildende Künste, Vienna, Austria. Having exhibited extensvely in the Nordic countries this is his first solo-exhibition outside Scandinavia.
