«Display Error»

In 1965 Nam June Paik used a magnet to bend the picture on a television set and called the result Magnet TV. A machine made to show a clean image was suddenly showing its own insides, and he treated the failure as material, not as a mistake. That idea is the starting point of this glitch portrait painting.

A young woman looks straight at you with one brown eye. Her hair is black, cut in a heavy fringe with streaks of blue, and the left half of her face is painted the old-fashioned way: soft skin, a nose, a few red marks on the cheek. The right half has turned into pixels. Pink, blue, orange and yellow blocks take over where her face should be, and a strip with her lips has slid sideways out of the rest of the head.

The background looks like a desktop after a crash. There are windows and toolbars, small icons, an orange QR code in the bottom left corner, and lettering that is reversed, cut off or scrambled.

The pixels are my version of Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots. He enlarged the printing dots of comics in works like Drowning Girl in 1963; I enlarged the squares of a broken screen. Glitch also became an art practice of its own, and Rosa Menkman wrote her Glitch Studies Manifesto in 2010 about exactly this: the error as the moment a medium shows what it is.

As a glitch portrait painting it keeps one thing intact: the eye survives. Everything around it can fail, and she still looks back. I painted it as an original pop art painting and up close the pixels are brushwork. On a wall it reads as contemporary pop art, and I think it suits art for office spaces, where people already stare at screens all day.

This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. There is also a hand-finished lithograph, ordered through Instagram or email.