After many years of working with digital media, emerging artist George Crîngașu’s focus shifts from a screen-confined practice towards the more traditional medium of painting. In an effort to reconnect with immediate reality, his recent works translate digital imagery and processes into objects that now take over physical space in the gallery, leaping out of the virtual spaces he formerly occupied. As opposed to the elaborate and polished nature of digital images, his newer works follow looser compositions and monolithic subjects with blurred boundaries.

The series produced for Art Cologne combines the two mediums: the vibrant paintings in acrylic on wood are complemented by digitally modelled wooden frames. Produced with computer-controlled industrial woodworking machinery, the frames’ shape is grown out of the artists’ drawings, which he digitally vectorizes and turns into 3D sculptures. The uncanny pairing of the painting and the 3D-modelled frame generates a commentary on the status of frames in art history – from craft to prosaic and later on stripped of all aesthetic purpose – suggesting the recent attention brought upon their historical importance. With their agency of skewing the conventional contemporary display of painting, the frames complete and extend the pictorial plane with digitally-crafted layers used in today’s architecture and design.

Thus, the five paintings-objects forcefully aggregate two different materialities which in Crîngașu’s work have always been only immaterially close. The subjects of the paintings, at first glance abstract interlocking shapes, metaphorically follow digital image processing techniques to distort characters and places into a state of liminality. Inspired by this study of liminality, the artists’ works continuously challenge the hierarchies and co-dependencies between digital and real matter. He seeks the progressively obscure boundaries between real/virtual, old media/new media, material/immaterial and questions their effect on human nature.