I sometimes think that it might be incorrect to separate abstract art from figurative art. Questions like ‘does it depict a form in any way?’ or ‘can I see a face or a body or a thing?’. Maybe it’s more appropriate to think about scale.

In the digital space a thing has no real scale. It’s only when it is seen in relation to something else that the scale of it become apparent. Therefore if there are no human elements, there is no way of relating to it on a biological scale. How then are we looking at something like this and what innate references are being brought to the front of our minds?

After going back and looking at some of my recent work, one of the main things I took from it aesthetically was that it felt geological. My artworks were slow. The time scale felt like tectonic plates moving methodically over thousands of years.

I remember a moment, years ago now, when I was struggling to really conceptualize cosmic history. In text books and science shows there was always a human reference: ‘’what would you experience if you were entering a black hole?’’, or ‘’how could a human survive just after the big bang’’ for instance. I couldn’t imagine these events, because they are impossible for a human to actually exist in. As soon as I took the human scale and experience out of the image, I was able to imagine the universe in a new way: it’s vastness, it’s changing of states.

During the making of this new series I became increasingly aware of how recent Artificial Intelligence advancements are affecting the current aesthetics in many works from my contemporaries. I became attracted to the odd, disjointed constructions. The images seemed to be eating themselves. I started to wonder, not so much if I should create prompted AI work myself, but what would happen if an autonomous AI interacted with my work.

I imagined an alien aesthetic, one free from our general conventions, and for some reason this brought about a latent feeling of Brutalist Architecture. The unforgiving Concrete massiveness, the vastness, filling space in a potentially infinite continuous expansion.

After I made the 6 new works, I watched documentaries about Brutalism and its place in social housing in the UK in the 1960/70s. Many “ordinary’’ folk commented on the inhuman quality of these buildings. They were built to solve a big problem in an elegant way, but to me it evoked the same feeling I had reading about black holes and how a human would experience those cosmic forces. There is a sense of a dystopian sublime. This inspired me to title most of the works after the postal codes and construction dates of Brutalist buildings.

Experiencing these works as a viewer rather than an artist, I feel a sparseness, an alien quality of aesthetic brutalism. They all connect in some way, maybe through the rhythm of the 3/3/3 composition or the feeling that most of the ‘’action’’ takes place on the edges, like they are trying to communicate with the next painting along, like they are escaping into each other.

My own struggle to understand cosmic history could be described as a journey to understanding the sublime. A place we can imagine, that doesn’t have to involve ourselves. A place so vast in scale it becomes abstract in its aesthetic nature. I think this is the experience I have in the good moments when making my ‘’paintings’’. I am not trying to organize anything except the paintings’ own characteristics, and these emerge in time out of the process. I guess you could call it an emergent aesthetic of abstract complexity.

Someone recently described my work as being understated or restrained. I would say this set of works definitely has this quality. Hopefully they will release their aesthetic story over time.

‘‘An emergent aesthetic of abstract complexity’’

a text by mical noelson

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