"Jeff Elrod: Galleria Christian Stein" by Marco Meneguzzo

Jeff Elrod’s work exploits some of the possibilities offered by digital graphics yet still maintains a traditional visual apparatus. At first glance, it even seems to exemplify a familiar type of abstraction that is cold and formally very composed. In fact, his extremely large canvases are made using an ink-jet printing technique, with marks typical of various computer programs (MS Paint, Photoshop, Illustrator) enormously enlarged so viewers can see the sequence of rectilinear strokes that make up every type of curve. Not everything in his work, however, is digital; in the long process that leads to the final, machine-printed image, Elrod introduces signs derived from his own gestures, placing them side by side with apparently similar but programmed images. For example, in the large canvas Sonora Lights (all works cited, 2016) a pattern of tiny black-and-white squares is superimposed on red shadings whose differences are as impalpable as those of a computer’s color palette; part of the field appears to have been deleted using the eraser function of a graphics program, while fine marks made by the movements of a mouse alternate with fluid brushstrokes, the “true” gesturalism of the brush simulating the “false” gesturalism of the mouse.

It is my impression that Elrod’s underlying concept has little to do with the celebration of a new technological tool, but a great deal to do with the idea of finding an immediate emotional result, achieved through a process that is anything but direct or expressionistic. Over the course of the twentieth century there have been many examples of this type of approach to the use of technological tools. These have ranged from Man Ray’s airbrushed “aerographs,” to the “light paintings” on emulsified canvas made by a number of artists in the 1970s and ’80s, to what the curator and critic Vittorio Fagone has dubbed the “electronic brush” of certain video artists—not to mention the digital landscape paintings David Hockney makes using his iPad.

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