Quayola - Dissected Palette

Quayola - Dissected Palette

PRE-ORDER PAGE (SHIPPING STARTING AFTER THE EXHIBITION AT LOAD 12th July 2025). In collaboration with Load gallery, Barcelona. A4, 32 pages, softcover.

Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper.

His work has been performed and exhibited in many prestigious institutions worldwide including V&A Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; How Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival.

Also a frequent collaborator on musical projects, Quayola has worked with composers, orchestras and musicians including London Contemporary Orchestra, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Vanessa Wagner, Jamie XX, Mira Calix, Plaid and Tale Of Us. In 2013, Quayola was awarded the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica.

In Dissected Palette, Quayola speculates on new forms of landscape painting, reflecting on how technology is rapidly transforming the way we observe and perceive the world around us. As our collective vision becomes increasingly mediated by digital processes that enhance, filter, and distort reality, the boundaries between the real and the artificial, the physical and the digital, continue to blur.

As a response to this evolving condition, Quayola draws a parallel with late 19th-century landscape painters who sought new visual languages to explore and depict nature. Similarly, he conducts systematic observations of natural landscapes and phenomena—yet his approach is mediated by advanced technological apparatuses and computational strategies that augment human perception and capabilities.

Natural landscapes become the subject of algorithmic dissection, where botanical forms are deconstructed into minimal units: shifting palettes and moving pixels. Though inclined toward abstraction, this process of visual synthesis remains deeply connected to the pictorial heritage. On the surface of the screen—treated as a digital canvas—clusters of matter and pixelated brushstrokes emerge, revealing their digital materiality and a new kind of algorithmic gesturality.