Blow de la Barra

Private view: Saturday January 27, 2007, 6:00 to 8:30 PM

The exhibition will remain open until Saturday March 9th, 2007
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM

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"It would be certainly a very foolish thing: try paint the Internet, start making oil-on-canvas paintings out of the computer world."
William S. Burroughs, 1996

Blow de la Barra is very pleased to present Miltos Manetas’ Internet Paintings. Manetas began working on the Internet Paintings in 2002. They combine two large canvases –one dark (as in Off) and the other bright (as in On), that represent painted collages of pages he finds in the Internet. As these sites are always appearing, changing and disappearing the surface of the paintings also evolves. They are infinite paintings; Manetas updates them regularly by adding any new websites he considers worthy of representation. A sentimental landscape of technology, an ever-changing biography of the internet and himself, the computer screen becomes a window for new and unexplored worlds: many of the websites represented in the paintings are there because they have changed the way we use the Internet, others are Internet artworks created by Manetas or his friends who use this medium as their studio and their place to exhibit their works. But most important, for Manetas these paintings have become a place to reflect on and recall different moments of his life.

Miltos Manetas was born in Athens, Greece. He currently lives and works between Milan, London, Los Angeles and Paris. Manetas has produced oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware. Impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a new "-ism" for a new art movement that reflected our times, Manetas hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating product names as Powerbook and Pentium, to create a new name for this new movement. In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in New York - and a panel of intellectuals and scientists to provide analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled a new word for the new art movement. It was a computer voice that made the announcement: “Ladies and Gentleman, the new name for contemporary art is NEEN. We hope that you like it!”

Blow de la Barra