JON RAFMAN

In his latest works, Rafman harnesses the creative potential of machine learningprocesses, continuing his longstanding practice of investigating the impact oftechnology on contemporary consciousness. The exhibition features bothalgorithmically generated paintings and video works that utilise permutations ofappropriated content, encompassing everything from fine art to mass marketingmaterial. Rafman incorporates the rich vocabulary and visuality of the Internet todevelop poetic narratives that critically engage with the present, creating works thatcapture the tension between the indifferent eye of the machine and the humanimpulse to find meaning.

Rafman’s created worlds feed off online subcultures, exploring the impact of the web’sdual nature on the human psyche, which can quickly shift from a sense of communityto total alienation. Entering the third floor of the Mayfair gallery building, visitorsencounter Rafman’s triptych video work Ɛ_ց_ɾҽ_ցօ_ɾҽ, which features a curated suite offound photographs that the artist has animated to underscore their latentdisconcerting qualities. An example of Rafman’s methodology of world-making, inwhich meta-narratives and lore from the artist’s vast archive take on a life of their own,Ɛ_ց_ɾҽ_ցօ_ɾҽ curates the collective unconscious of the Internet and its users into asequence of discrete uncanny scenes.

Also on view on the gallery’s third floor are Rafman’s new, large-scale paintings.Created by merging the latest in text-to-image AI with innovative printing and paintingtechniques, these works seek to problematise the expected sterility of algorithmically-generated images, bringing their abstract digitally into physical materiality.Thematically, the works are in line with many of Rafman’s dreamlike past interests,including the hybridisation of creatures and animals with humans, the confusion ofadolescent memory with fantasy, and the atomisation of modern subjectivity.

Rafman’s major video work Counterfeit Poast, consisting of images created with thesame AI image generation technology as the paintings and animated using face-tracking iPhone apps, concludes the third-floor presentation. Composed of asequence of character-study vignettes, Counterfeit Poast explores the interrelation ofcrafted online identities and memories with intimate personal identities and memories,and how it is that one constitutes and distorts the other.

In Rafman’s video work Punctured Sky–shown in the gallery’s basement–the viewerfollows a former gamer through eerie environments on his destabilising search for acomputer game that seems to have disappeared without a trace. The film resembles aso-called ‘creepypasta’–a horror legend that is modified, copied, and circulated onthe Internet with vague or anonymous origins. Punctured Sky touches on interpersonalrelationships, the trials and tribulations of one’s memory, and the dynamic psychologyof an isolated, atomised individual.

Coinciding with Rafman’s exhibition at the London gallery is a show by GretchenBender on the ground and first floor. The pairing of these artist positions is profoundand not coincidental: Bender’s work, which focuses on images of mass media,television, and media art from the 1980s and 1990s, enters a dynamic dialogue withRafman’s immersive and technology-driven practice.

Jon Rafman’s film Minor Daemon, Vol. 1 (2022) will be shown in a parallel soloexhibition at 180 The Strand. His first narrative feature film tells the story of theintersecting lives and fates of two young men–Billy and Minor Daemon–in a surrealvirtual dystopia, a distorted carnival mirror of our world. Both share an extraordinarygift for virtual reality gaming that could secure their freedom on their Dantean journeythrough captivity.

Jon Rafman (*1981, Montreal) lives and works in Montreal and Los Angeles. Rafman’srecent solo exhibitions were held at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022), Ordet, Milan(2022), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021), Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020),Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2018), Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2017), StedelijkMuseum, Amsterdam (2016), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Muenster (2016), Musée d’artContemporain de Montréal (2015) and The Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015). Hisworks have been featured in prominent international group exhibitions, includingKunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Belgrade Biennale (2021), the 58th Venice Biennale(2019), Sharjah Biennial (2019 and 2017), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston(2018), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2017), K11 Art Shanghai (2017), LesAbattoirs, Toulouse (2017), Berlin Biennial 9 (2016), Manifesta Biennial for EuropeanArt 11 (2016), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), Biennale de Lyon (2015) andFridericianum, Kassel (2013).