On my way to the office today, I passed Lord & Taylor and was blown away when I looked at the windows. They held a series of paintings from the Spanish artist Juan Genoves (click here for larger version of image above). My brain immediately took its own path, thinking how this painting holds a wonderful place in a visual representation of some trends we have seen.
We can start with Lucian Freud (that is a portrait of his mother) as the icon for the start of the Web, which saw experiments in community that were a little ahead of the mainstream’s readiness to adopt. Early Web was thus mostly solitary, focused on consumption of content and goods. Like Freud, who has wrestled with the portrait his entire life, the early Web was about the “I” and the “YOU”.
Genova’s work also made me think of Wayne Theibaud with that pop aesthetic. Theibaud’s highly stylized hillscapes (click for larger image) could be the next step in this visual journey, representing the obsession about “PLACE” which we saw so often in the early days of Second Life as fascination swirled around virtual architecture and representation of the real.
Genova’s paintings (see image at top) symbolize the journey to focus in on a core strength of virtual worlds, which is social interaction and communication. Genova strips out location, architecture, infrastructure and hones in on the simple essence of the crowd, of social energy, and the concept of “WE”.
If you are in New York, swing by Lord and Taylor at 38th and 5th Avenue and check out these fabulous paintings.
译文:
艺林漫步
今日上班途经Lord&Taylor，橱窗里的一幕让我大为惊喜。他们摆起了西班牙画家Juan Genoves的作品（click here 点击察看大图）。我马上浮想联翩起来，想着这幅画如何在我们所见过的各种流派中充当着视觉艺术完美代表的角色。
用Lucian Freud 作为网站的代表人物开始吧。（这是一幅他母亲的画像）这幅画中露出了些试验性质的苗头，超出了主流接受的范围。早期网站就是这样变得如此孤立，专注于内容及物品的消耗。就像Freud,在与肖像画的纠葛中花去了一生的时间，早期的网站都只是关于“我”和“你”。
Genova的作品同样让我想起带有流行艺术元素的Wayne Theibaud ，这种带有强烈程序感的山景可能成为这段视觉旅程的下一个亮点，它代表着对“地点”的痴迷，这种痴迷在第二人生早期阶段曾经风靡于视觉建筑领域，代表着真实。
Genova的画作（见上图）象征着凸现视觉世界核心力量的征途，也就是社交。Genova丢弃地点，建筑以及公共设施的概念，精心把人群，社会力量及“我们”这一概念打磨成简单的精华。
假如你在纽约正巧路过第五大道38号的Lord&Taylor，去看看这些鬼斧神工吧。