Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, the time has come to talk about Jacqueline Humphries, this artist who is redefining the boundaries of abstract painting in the digital age. In her vast Red Hook studio in New York, with soaring ceilings and bathed in eastern light, she conducts a fascinating experimentation that transforms the canvas into a territory exploring the limits between the tangible and the virtual, between the materiality of painting and the immateriality of digital codes.
In a world where our screens hypnotize us day and night, where our emotions are reduced to standardized emojis, and where our attention fragments into a myriad of sparkling pixels, Humphries accomplishes something extraordinary: she transmutes this digital cacophony into a visual symphony that forces us to slow down, to truly look, to feel. Her monumental works are not mere paintings; they are portals to a liminal space where analog and digital intertwine in a complex and subtle dance.
This artist, born in New Orleans in 1960, has traversed the decades while maintaining a unique position in the world of contemporary art. Trained at the Parsons School of Design and then at the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Program in the 1980s, she chose to persevere with painting at a time when this medium was considered moribund. This perseverance turned into a relentless quest to reinvent the possibilities of painting in the face of the technological changes of our time.
Take, for example, her famous silver paintings. At first glance, you might mistake them for giant screens. But get closer. The reflective surface plays with light in a way that no screen could reproduce. The reflections change according to your position, creating a kinesthetic experience that defies photographic reproduction. The work stubbornly refuses to be reduced to a mere jpeg image, thus resisting the digital standardization that flattens our perception of the world.
The physical and experiential dimension of Humphries’ work strikingly echoes the thoughts of philosopher Gilbert Simondon on the relationship between humans and technology. In his fundamental work “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” Simondon develops the revolutionary idea that technology is not opposed to culture but constitutes an essential dimension of it. He categorically rejects the simplistic dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, instead proposing a vision where humans and technology co-evolve in a relationship of complex interdependence.
Humphries’ paintings perfectly embody this Simondonian vision. When she uses stencils created from ASCII characters to reproduce her earlier works, she does not merely recycle; she invents a new pictorial language that transcends the distinction between manual gesture and mechanical reproduction. Her canvases become zones of mediation where computer code and artistic expression meet and mutually transform each other.
This approach particularly reminds us of Simondon’s reflections on technical individuation. For the philosopher, a technical object is not simply an inert tool but a constantly evolving system that participates in our collective becoming. Similarly, Humphries’ paintings are not static objects; they literally evolve according to our position and the ambient light, creating an experience that can be reduced neither to the pure materiality of painting nor to the virtuality of the digital.
Her series of fluorescent paintings displayed under black light perfectly illustrate this dimension. These works create an ambiguous space between the materiality of paint and the immateriality of light. The fluorescent pigment, usually associated with nightclub atmospheres and pop culture, is here elevated to the status of a sophisticated artistic medium. These paintings remind us that all perception is mediated, whether by our eyes, by a screen, or by the visual culture surrounding us. This mediation is not an obstacle to overcome but the very place where our relationship to the world is played out.
The artist pushes this exploration even further with her works incorporating CAPTCHA tests. These digital devices, designed to distinguish humans from robots in our online interactions, become under her brush elements of a new visual grammar. She transforms these markers of our technological anxiety into compositions that question the very nature of authenticity and artistic expression in the age of artificial intelligence.
Her use of emojis is just as provocative and sophisticated. These standardized pictograms, often criticized as symbols of the impoverishment of our emotional communication, are reinvested with unexpected complexity in her work. Superimposed, distorted, integrated into successive layers of paint, they lose their immediate communicative function to become elements of a richer and more ambiguous pictorial syntax.
Simondon’s reflection on technical alienation takes on a particular resonance here. For the philosopher, alienation does not stem from technology itself, but from our inability to understand and integrate technology into our culture. Humphries’ paintings show us a possible path to reconciliation, where digital technology is neither demonized nor idolized, but integrated into an artistic practice that reveals its complexity and poetic potential.
This integration is particularly striking in her treatment of the pictorial surface. The layers of paint, stenciled patterns, and metallic reflections create a depth that is not simply spatial but temporal. Each canvas bears the traces of multiple interventions, like a visual testimony where the digital and the analog inscribe and rewrite each other, creating a complex dialogue between different modes of image production.
In her most recent works, Humphries goes even further in exploring the boundaries between the manual and the mechanical. She uses computer programs to scan her old paintings and convert them into ASCII code, then uses these codes as a basis for new compositions. This process of translation and retranslation creates works that are both familiar and strangely new, like digital echoes of pictorial gestures.
The artist constantly plays with our expectations and perceptual habits. Her silver paintings, for example, reflect not only light but also the viewer, creating an interaction reminiscent of touch screens. Yet, unlike our digital devices that give us the illusion of control, these reflections remind us of our unstable position, our inability to fix the image in a definitive form.
This instability is at the heart of Humphries’ artistic project. She shows us that painting, far from being obsolete in the digital age, can become a privileged place to explore the paradoxes of our contemporary condition. Her works invite us to slow down, to observe the multiple layers of mediation that structure our experience, to recognize the complexity of our relationship with technology.
In this, her work echoes another crucial aspect of Simondon’s thought: the idea that technology is not simply a means to an end, but a mode of existence that participates in our collective becoming. Humphries’ paintings are not commentaries on technology, but devices that allow us to experiment with new forms of perception and relationship.
This experimental dimension is particularly evident in her way of working in series, each work serving as a starting point for new explorations. Patterns, gestures, effects circulate from one canvas to another, creating a network of relationships reminiscent of the rhizomatic structure of the Internet. But unlike the constant flow of digital images that characterizes our era, her paintings compel us to stop, to take time to perceive subtle variations, plays of light, layering of layers.
Her work with black light is particularly interesting. These pieces, which can only be seen under specific lighting conditions, create an immersive experience that radically transforms our perception of space. Fluorescent pigments, activated by ultraviolet light, produce a brightness that seems to emanate from within the canvas, blurring the boundaries between the painted surface and the surrounding space.
This exploration of light as an artistic medium reminds us of the experiments of Dan Flavin, but Humphries takes the experience in a radically different direction. Whereas Flavin worked with fluorescent light as a sculptural material, Humphries uses it as a way to question the very nature of visibility in a world dominated by luminous screens.
Her use of ASCII characters represents another major innovation. By transforming her paintings into code and then converting that code back into painting, she creates a cycle of translation that highlights the different layers of mediation characterizing our contemporary experience of images. This process recalls Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the mechanical reproduction of art, updated for the digital age.
The emojis in her work function similarly. These symbols, now ubiquitous in our daily communication, are diverted from their usual function to become elements of a new visual syntax. Humphries uses them as basic units of a pictorial language that plays with the conventions of emotional expression in the digital era.
Humphries’s art thus reminds us that technique is not opposed to sensitivity, that digital does not exclude the tactile, that mechanical reproduction can generate new forms of authenticity. Her paintings create a space where these apparent contradictions can coexist and transform each other, opening new possibilities for contemporary art.
In an age obsessed with speed and immediacy, Jacqueline Humphries’s work offers us a moment of pause, an invitation to reconsider our relationship with images and technology. Her paintings do not give us simple answers but provide a space for reflection and experience where digital and analog, mechanical and gestural, code and expression can enter into dialogue.
Through her exploration of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, Humphries shows us that painting remains a vital medium for understanding and questioning our contemporary condition. Her work reminds us that art is not simply a mirror of our time but a laboratory where new forms of perception and experience can emerge. Her works offer us a space of resistance and reflection, a place where the complexity of our relationship with the digital can be explored and rethought.
