2019 CHRIS COY
Reverse Lorax, Chris Coy’s latest solo exhibition, features oil paintings co-created with an Artificial Intelligence program. Coy filters eighteenth-century art through twenty-first century technological processes to make unpredictable, uncontrollable, undreamed-of artworks for our increasingly post-human world.
For Reverse Lorax’s Transfermaster-C series, Coy employed an Artificial Intelligence program, similar to Google’s DeepDream system, to see, interpret, and represent the world as Rococo artists once did. By feeding it a “decadent diet” of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher images, the program learned to transform everything it saw into something lighter, more playful, and more luxurious. Coy then instructed the program to transfer the Rococo style onto Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, which are some of the darkest and most disturbing images in the history of art, the absolute antithesis of “light and playful.” The improbable art-historical mash-ups that Coy’s style transfer system produced are both beautiful and troubling. Rendered by computers but later hand-painted in oil, the Transfermaster-C paintings are surreal abstractions with minds of their own. Biomorphic landforms of butterscotch syrup, peach, and hot fudge melt and morph into whipped-cream skies. “They may look as light and fluffy as cotton candy,” Coy warns, “but they’re the heaviest cotton candy you’ll ever eat.” As delicious as they are monstrous, Coy’s style transfer paintings celebrate the “happy accidents” that Artificial Intelligence generates while reminding us of its catastrophic potential. AI can enhance our perception of reality or distort it beyond human recognition.
In a related series, After Nature, the frolicsome lovers and lush gardens of Fragonard’s Rococo masterpiece Happy Accidents of the Swing have been rendered as ambient occlusion passes beneath a perfect cyan sky. These paintings present Fragonard’s swing scene from multiple perspectives, pulling the Rococo forward into the virtual and tethering the frivolity of Fragonard’s world to our own.