Review: Old masters go digital at Remastered

Curated by collaborative organisation Jotta and Intel, Remastered is a show at London’s One Marylebone which features radical reinterpretations of classic works. I went along to the private view on 9th March 2011 to take a look at the show, which featured artwork by Midnight Toastie, Rafael Pavon, Robert Corish and Eric Schockmel (plus many more, these just happened to be my personal favourites).

One Marylebone is a fantastic space; an 18th Century church on the edge of London’s Regent’s Park. Its spacious layout provided the perfect foil for the artwork in Remastered. Starting off in the upper gallery, viewers were treated to Robert Corish’s light-and-music reinterpretation of Kandinsky’s On White, Daniel Swan’s reinterpretation of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, and more from Bompas & Parr, Vanessa Harden, and Paul Bryan and Jonathan Ryall. Spiralling down stone stairs into the old church’s former nave – backlit by its original stained glass windows – the first thing that hit the eye was Midnight Toastie’s variant on Starry Night – a moving, ‘living’ interpretation of Van Gogh’s masterpiece which reimagines the landscape itself in a crafted collage of geometric elements, with a webcam and screen projecting moving light behind – effectively making the eponymous stars move and spiral with the energy of the original piece. The next thing that really caught my eye was Mind the Fog, an animation from Rafael Pavon based on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. I’m not generally a fan of stereoscopic 3D (simply because it makes my eyes hurt, so I can’t sit through a full movie) but this little short, which replaced the ‘sea of fog’ with the streets of London, graffiti and all, is a lovely, evocative piece that updates the chilling, liminal air of Friedrich’s pensive figure gazing over the landscape. As Rafael Pavon says, “This is a portrayal of that overwhelming and magnificent confusion that one might experience when observing the city from a distance”.

Onto my favourite then; a piece of 2D animation from Eric Schockmel in a bold, limited colour harmony of yellow, red and black. Based on JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, it was entitled The Great Western Singularity. Taking Turner’s fascination with transport one step further, Eric Schockmel uses the train of Turner’s iconic painting as a metaphor for technology itself, growing, reshaping and moving ever faster. Great concept, but I’ve got to admit I was suckered in by the look of the thing; at once retro (Tron style image planes) and neo-Cubist (Errm, again, Tron-style image planes). “Why, what was it?” my other half asked when I got home. “Hmm. Imagine Studio Ghibli doing a Gorillaz video on an Acorn Archimedes…”

Featuring a range of workshops aimed at engaging viewers with digital media, Remastered may be a short-run show but was certainly an important one in terms of bringing digital imaging into the wider fold of the art world. We’ll be taking a deeper look at the implications of Remastered in issue 19 of Digital Artist.

Image above; still from The Great Western Singularity by Eric Schockmel, courtesy of Remastered and supplied by Margaret London.