Jason Salavon at The Project - Brief Article

In "Everything, All at Once," Jason Salavon's first solo show in New York, this veteran of the Whitney's "BitStreams" exhibition unambiguously establishes himself as a leading practitioner of the emerging genre of computer-based art. The show's title work is a video monitor that shows TV programming in which each frame of the input is simplified to its average color. The result is a pulsating monochrome that changes tonality and intensity in conjunction with the real-time, unaltered soundtrack. In this visually reductive world, the emotive trajectory of a television commercial, for example, is nevertheless entirely clear; the averaged colors achieve a symbolic significance as they plot the narrative of the voiceover.

The most challenging work in the exhibition is 100,000 Abstract Paintings, to which the upstairs back room of The Project was devoted. 100,000 Abstract Paintings is ostensibly a simple installation in which a series of images, all reminiscent of the Color-Field variety of Abstract Expressionism, emanate from a video projector hooked up to a computer. Like a fast-paced slide show, each "painting" appears on the wall for four seconds; a digital counter tracks the progress through the vast series.

Salavon did not design the images themselves, but rather the software that generates them. In successive iterations of the software code, Salavon refined a wide range of tonal and compositional parameters within which the "paintings" would be created. The results are rife with references to Diebenkorn, Hofmann, Newman and Rothko; this mesmerizing serial saga is both an ironic homage to Abstract Expressionism and a tour-de-force demonstration of the power of the computer in this artist's hands.

In 76 Blowjobs, Salavon averages 76 fellatial close-ups. The outcome is a beautiful Turneresque abstraction of pinks and flesh tones through which the original source material is nevertheless readable, one close-up blowjob looking very much like another within the standard conventions of pornographic photography.

Less legible but no less beautiful are the images in a suite of photographs derived from hundreds of digitally averaged real-estate photos of median-priced single family homes in different metropolitan areas. The cool, rainy tones of 109 Homes for Sale, Seattle/Tacoma contrast with the redbrick architecture that lends its color to 117 Homes for Sale, Chicagoland, but that is about as much of the original source material as one can make out in these inviting Whistlerian landscapes.

Poised between contemporary mass culture and the history of art, and between painterly expression and the raw data of digital source material and computer code, Salavon's work is a significant achievement and a promising New York debut.

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