The works comprising the series ‘Matisse Without the Colors’ showcase differing interpretations of images derived from Instagram posts. These readings take the open semantic structures of the initiating artworks and proceed to close, reopen, and reclose them. The photographs, which serve as the first step of each piece, include visual elements of the digital social space they originate from. The second step is a strong-handed reduction of the artwork to text, derived from that generated by Instagram’s own image recognition algorithm. The third step is a description provided by the authors of the images themselves, which opens up the content of the images to be contextualized and informed by authorial intent. The last step is a synthesis of the two texts, which collapses the content back into a simplistic and seemingly unquestionable description, now based on the intent provided by the author.

Throughout the sequence of interpretations, innocuous images are assigned concrete content—initially only by processes of algorithmic analysis of their formal elements, secondly by their authors, who impart their personal readings of the works onto them, and lastly by combining the two forms of rendition as text. The initial alt text generated when images enter Instagram’s digital environment serves as the model, emulated in the final “alt” text which, based on the author’s own description, imparts a “definitive” content onto the work. Through this, the meaning of the initial artwork is forcibly quantized. Alternative readings of the works, which fall outside of the parameters determined by their authors, are set in competition, as the finalizing authoritative statement stands to dissuade any differing interpretation. As such, the contents of the sampled works are progressively closed off to interpretation, leaving only the process of interpretation to be the content of the work.

The series works to showcase its unseen production and pricing mechanisms. Repeating images executed in different mediums — pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, oil, ordered screenprint, artist screenprint, inkjet print and giclee print — reveal their material costs and the required added value to reach their uniform sale price. The initial image, serving as a constant modus, sets the following two units in motion, which describe the object, firstly as an artist’s financial investment, and secondly as a potential return on investment within the art market.

The content of the image is effectively disregarded, once it is visually implemented into its financialized environment, generating a novel expression by depicting this process. Through this system the artwork is reduced to its financial makeup, rendering it only as earning potential and depicting its reification. As the sequence of mediums moves towards ever greater automation, the benefits of mechanizing production, and alienating ones-self from their work is disclosed, concluding with immaculate and infinitely replicable digital prints.

The series unveils invisible aspects of technical images and the discrepancies between their front-facing facades and their back-end structures. All motives are adapted to and respond to their constant physical format by altering the quantity and size of present elements, or the amount of encoded content within the works. The series serves to highlight the sheer technical complexity hidden behind the insignificant, so ubiquitous as to seem almost banal.

010058211020 begins with a one-to-one data relationship between vector images and their code. Abstract minimal images are made technologically un-abstract by being repeated in their textual form as code. The same is done with .png images, whose textual size is orders of magnitude larger; this aspect is addressed in the titles of the works, which describe the relationship between the crop of the appropriated image and the “crop” of its code. The disparity in size between the whole and the sample is further elaborated on in the continuing triptychs, which, by scanning a portion film as it plays, calcify it into a still image. Extending this concept further, the final set of two triptychs captures a portion of an artistic encoding of the year 1968, which is, by using the same scanning process, transcoded to 10 minutes of the entire year.