Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, the time has come to talk about Jacqueline Humphries, the artist who redefines the frontiers of abstract painting in the digital age. In her vast studio in Red Hook, New York, with its dizzying ceilings washed in eastern light, she leads a fascinating experimentation that transforms the canvas into a territory for exploring the limits between the tangible and the virtual, between the materiality of paint 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 the analog and the 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 contemporary art world. Trained at the Parsons School of Design and then at the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Program in the 1980s, she chose to persist in painting at a time when this medium was considered moribund. This perseverance transformed into an unrelenting quest to reinvent the possibilities of painting in the face of the technological changes of our time.
Take, for example, her famous silver canvases. At first glance, you might confuse them with giant screens. But approach them. The reflective surface plays with light in a way that no screen could reproduce. The reflections change depending on your position, creating a kinesthetic experience that defies photographic reproduction. The artwork stubbornly refuses to be reduced to a mere jpeg image, thus resisting the digital standardization that flattens our perception of the world.
This physical and experiential dimension of Humphries’ work strikingly echoes the thought of philosopher Gilbert Simondon on the relationship between man and technique. In his fundamental work “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” Simondon develops the revolutionary idea that technique is not opposed to culture, but constitutes an essential dimension of it. He categorically rejects the simplistic dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, proposing instead a vision where the human and the technique 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 is not merely recycling – she is inventing a new pictorial language that transcends the distinction between manual gesture and mechanical reproduction. Her canvases become areas of mediation where computer code and artistic expression meet and mutually metamorphose.
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 system in constant evolution that participates in our collective becoming. Likewise, Humphries’ paintings are not static objects – they literally evolve based on our position and the ambient light, creating an experience that cannot be reduced either to the pure materiality of paint or to the virtuality of the digital.
Her series of fluorescent paintings displayed under black light perfectly illustrates this dimension. These works create an ambiguous space between the materiality of paint and the immateriality of light. The fluorescent pigment, usually associated with the atmospheres of nightclubs and pop culture, is here elevated to the status of sophisticated artistic medium. These paintings remind us that all perception is mediated, whether through our eyes, through a screen, or through the visual culture that surrounds us. This mediation is not a barrier to overcome but the very place where our relationship to the world unfolds.
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 equally 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 special resonance here. For the philosopher, alienation does not stem from technique itself but from our inability to understand and integrate technique into our culture. Humphries’ paintings show us a possible path to reconciliation, where the digital is neither demonized nor idolized, but integrated into an artistic practice that reveals its complexity and poetic potential.
This integration manifests particularly strikingly in her treatment of the pictorial surface. The layers of paint, the stencil patterns, the 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 analog inscribe and rewrite themselves mutually, creating a complex dialogue between different modes of image production.
In her most recent works, Humphries pushes this exploration of the boundaries between the manual and the mechanical even further. She uses computer programs to scan her old paintings and convert them into ASCII code, then uses this code as a basis for new compositions. This process of translation and retranslating 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, not only reflect light but also the viewer, creating an interaction that recalls that 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 into 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 space for exploring 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 respect, her work echoes another crucial aspect of Simondon’s thought: the idea that technique is not merely a means to an end, but a mode of existence that participates in our collective becoming. Humphries’ paintings are not comments on technology but devices that allow us to experiment with new forms of perception and relationship.
This experimental dimension is particularly evident in her series work, each piece serving as a starting point for new explorations. The motifs, gestures, and effects circulate from one canvas to another, creating a network of relationships that recalls the rhizomatic structure of the Internet. But unlike the constant flow of digital images that characterizes our time, her paintings compel us to stop, to take the time to perceive subtle variations, plays of light, and overlapping layers.
Her work with black light is particularly interesting. These works, which can only be seen under specific lighting conditions, create an immersive experience that radically transforms our perception of space. The 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 Dan Flavin’s experiments, but Humphries pushes the experience in a radically different direction. While Flavin worked with fluorescent light as a sculptural material, Humphries uses it to question the very nature of visibility in a world dominated by bright screens.
Her use of ASCII characters represents another major innovation. By transforming her paintings into code and then retransforming this code back into painting, she creates a cycle of translation that highlights the different layers of mediation that characterize our contemporary image experience. This process echoes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the mechanical reproduction of the artwork, but updated for the digital age.
The emojis in her work function similarly. These symbols, becoming 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 age.
Humphries’ art thus reminds us that technique is not opposed to sensitivity, that the 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 mutually transform, opening up new possibilities for contemporary art.
In an age obsessed with speed and immediacy, Jacqueline Humphries’ 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 propose a space of reflection and experience where the digital and the analog, the mechanical and the gestural, the code and the 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 merely 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.
