Jason Rouse, DayZ En Plein Air, Oil on board, 12’ x 18’, 2014
The emerging genre of video game landscape paintings is rife with contradictions. This is why it is so interesting.
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In Jason Rouse’s artistic practice, the distance between the canvas and the screen tends to disappear. What is at stake, here, is the same convergence that Anne Freidberg discussed in her masterful book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), an overlap that applies both to framing devices and to what we could call, after John Berger, ways of seeing. This is especially manifest in Kossoff Flees Ukraine, in which a scanned painting of Leon Kossoff is imported through photogrammetry into a video game development toolkit and then “animated” via algorithms, images and sounds. The painterly nature of Kossoff Flees Ukraine is also evoked through the “slow pace” of the video itself, which in turn alludes to the popular first-person shooter/open world DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2018). We can look at a previous work by Rouse, DayZ En Plein Air (2014), as the ideal companion piece to Kossoff Flees Ukraine.
Created almost a decade ago, DayZ En Plein Air is the outcome of the artist’s ongoing study of the relationship between the medium of painting and the medium of the video game. Such exploration can be described as a process of de-contextualization: Rouse translates digital artifacts into paintings and vice versa. This practice, by all means, is far from unique. It is, in fact, relatively common within contemporary art: consider, for instance, the work of such artists as Aram Bartholl and Miltos Manetas. The former has consistently, almost compulsively introduced elements, assets, and even behaviors that originated within the domain of video games into the real world: such intrusions often trigger a cognitive dissonance in the viewer, whose impact is enhanced by a powerful aesthetic experience concocted by the German artist. In the meantime, Manetas has recreated through the medium of painting the iconography of digital tools such as Google Maps, as part of his ongoing, encyclopedic project Internet Paintings…
Matteo Bittanti
Bohemia Interactive, DayZ, video game, 2018
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