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.