| In terms of both its popularity and its many developments over the past decade, the medium of digital art has experienced a rapid incline, and, through his expertly wrought experimentations within this particular art form, artist and visionary Ric Globus has consistently made it look easy. It is for this reason that artist and curator Abraham Lubelski invited Globus to Broadway Gallery this spring for a solo show of his recent works at the New York City gallery. Although digital in origin, Globus’ work is perhaps most powerful when displayed in large format, especially on the large canvasses set against the otherwise white walls of Broadway Gallery during his spring 2007 show, "Realms." |
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Ric Globus – Simone Cappa
In terms of both its popularity and its many developments over the past decade, the medium of digital art has experienced a rapid incline, and, through his expertly wrought experimentations within this particular art form, artist and visionary Ric Globus has consistently made it look easy. It is for this reason that artist and curator Abraham Lubelski invited Globus to Broadway Gallery this spring for a solo show of his recent works at the New York City gallery. Although digital in origin, Globus’ work is perhaps most powerful when displayed in large format, especially on the large canvasses set against the otherwise white walls of Broadway Gallery during his spring 2007 show, "Realms." Although I had viewed Globus’ works several times beforehand on the artist’s website (www.ricglobus.com ), it took this non-virtual exhibition of his digital renderings to truly stop me in my proverbial tracks. In viewing each of these works outside the context of my 12-inch laptop’s monitor, I was immediately struck by the complexity of the artist’s incorporation of light, shade and otherworldly forms. In this show of his recent work, Globus truly creates never-before-encountered realms that are more than worthy of exploration.
In walking through the exhibition, each of Globus’ experiments in color, shape and digitally rendered environments brings the viewer to a different world all its own. Works like his monumental Color Fractal Grid call to mind the complex matrices of light and color that make up each of our intercellular existences, or else that constitute the organization of our larger universe. Although like an experiment in Cubism and abstraction, Globus makes clear that this work is actually nothing of the kind through its heavily layered, light-infused three-dimensionality upon a two dimensional canvas. The shapes and colors making up this complex matrix seem to glimmer as a result of some un-pictured light source making each of these patterns of forms visible. Additionally, as a result of Globus’ complex layering of shape upon shape and angle upon angle, even a fourth dimension becomes imaginable. This work by Globus, therefore, is truly an achievement for digital art making, if not for art in general.
In another work, MINEline, the artist doesn’t so much call to mind the intricacy and complexity of our microscopic or macrocosmic universe as he does create a kind of alternative universe all its own. Here, a narrow tube with ridges and turns of varying thicknesses stretches across the canvas. The lack of context given this tube by the artist is what makes it appear so removed from our reality. At first guess, one might presume this a depiction of a wormhole in space, but the neutral-colored background and incorporation of the tube’s shadow force one to reconsider. The object here stands completely on its own, representing an "unknown." What Globus creates here is a golden-colored scene that we don’t quite recognize-or do we? Is this tube the innards of some mysterious organism? Or is it the sinuous, computerized blood-and-circuitry of our posthuman selves? In our technologically hyper-driven age of endlessly mediated, digitized reality, have our bodies themselves morphed into something strangely hybrid and new? These are just some of the ambivalent, self-contradictory, and deeply unsettling ideas that pass through one’s head while viewing Globus’ otherworldly creations.
Globus not only creates work using the tools of our present day technology. He produces art that implicitly and explicitly interrogates these tools, and their effect on our sense of the structures and contours of our experience. His vision is broad and expansive, as it attempts to chart the edges of our visual knowledge, introducing us to beings and shapes we have only seem in our dreams. In other realms.
