First person shooter, exhibition text
In a first person shooter you are a gun that moves. Inflicting violence more or less sparingly to achieve your goals. You are in the position of the protagonist, main character, player one. As an avatar of a virtual world, you navigate the map, amassing experiences and destroying anything that gets in your way. It's kill or be killed.
Aesthetics of early first person shooters were determined by an economy of means. Computers lacked processing power so the action took place inside confined spaces like corridors and small rooms. The computer only drew on the screen what would be visible to the player depending on their point of view, the rest existed in potential computation and latent memory. Just in time, on demand subjective reality, is not unlike the way in which the world is experienced by many today, via a screen, the result of compounded histories of algorithmic reinforcement made even more singular through the scarce selection of the attention economy.
Art history, usually read backwards as a series of iconoclasms, is also cyclical. Booms, busts and bubbles; each time abandoned only to be revisited via new technologies of production and distribution. The painting functioned as a window in the Renaissance, a representation of a point of view from which the surrounding world could be rendered. It ceased being one at the insistence of the modernists, and may again be a sort of window since the screen is the principal interface through which we experience reality, which is to say through images.
The screenpainting is a membrane between the real and the virtual. If the historical avant garde wished to plumb the depths of our psyches via this membrane; and later Americans unplugged the signal cable seeking only perceptions of pure color; Donzé's paintings evoke rather than connote directly; the violence and stochastic present of increasingly gamified (financialized, militarized, and incentivized) and volatile worlds. By layering motifs and painting techniques (primarily airbrush) Donzé produces a maelstrom of surfaces, reflections, traces and artifacts, at once buzzing alive and consuming themselves into nothing.
Certain works grew out of formal examinations of police riot shields. A framing device for oppressive state force; at once barrier and membrane. The works themselves are almost decomposing, a dream of abolishing the police or an acknowledgement that military and state violence is continually diffusing and seeping into the world around us.
Glistening surfaces, analog static : Giverny corroded by Gustav Metzger's acids, figures of suited men appear out of these motifs like a retinal burn, or a final boss, a pareidolic apparition of the subliminal drive for capital and control that appears out of the noise of everyday life and consciousness. No longer just "tue le flic qui dort en toi", but :"tue le techbro qui 996 en toi."* Is there a difference?
Inset flames; between an architect's interior and a sterile crematorium, if the foyer or fireplace is always already a historic place of gathering and envelopping, it has the potential for destruction and finality bound up in itself. It warms and nourishes, it destroys and cleanses. The monkeys, d'après Dürer - celebrate, dance, mourn, or cry beside a blazing fire. It is unclear who is burning what and why as well as if, like monkeys left to their typewriters long enough, they have made something of genius or something destructive.
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* The 996 working hour system is a work schedule that derives its name from its requirement that workers clock in from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week, resulting in employees working 12 hours per day and 72 hours per week.
