Keating’s latest works in the Overview series, are the result of collecting photographs and video of unwitting subjects from balconies in France, digitizing them on computer and painting them on canvas. This series brings together many elements that artists have explored throughout the 20th Century: abstract naturalism, expressive realism, narrative painting, photography and video. In each work, we find organic shapes of foreshortened figures forming dynamic relationships with the patterns and walkways of their urban environments. Opposing elements of photography and abstraction somehow come together as perfect partners in this blending of 20th century painting ideas; abstraction, expression and narration with 21st Century technology; digitized video, satellite surveillance and internet voyeurism. Expressionistic mark-making depicts walking subjects, stop-action, mid-step in thick paint that renders motion in the form of video scan lines and pixel artifacts. Keating has painstakingly selected the exact frame, from hundreds, that tell us the story of each character, and rendered the digital nature of each image in a painterly style depicting a privileged view of a private moment.
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Artist Warren Keating 