Adam Berg: Resonances

Building on the artist’s dedicated practice investigating the interrelationships of art and science, Berg conceives of painting as a means of introducing concepts of scientific investigations into wider audiences and conversations. Encapsulating the essence of this new body of work, Berg entitles this project Resonance suggesting the expanded field of reverberations which he seeks to draw into his work. Incorporating mathematical, scientific, computational, and topological ideas – and specifically Sheaf theory which establishes connections between local and global properties of topological space.

Although created with only vigorous brushwork and the repetitive concentric strokes of Berg’s brushes, the painting operates as lush plasmatic images of distant worlds or the rotating and entwining patterns constructed by the most complex of computational algorithms.

Each of the paintings within the system is titled AGI or Auto Generative Images which is the artist’s playful restatement of the term Artificial General Intelligence or more commonly referred to as AI (Artificial Intelligence). For Berg each of the works is sentient in its creation. He states, “they command my attention to what they, as self-emergent agents, want to become as opposed to me as the intervening agent (i.e.. painter) is telling them what I want them to become.”

In a parallel to Surrealist automatism, the method of artmaking in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, Berg considers each work as having autopoiesis, or the ability to create, maintain or renew itself which allow for each to establish its own visual agency. To Berg, “the painting reveals itself to me and to the viewer, and together we (artist and viewer) generate our meaning and connections which constitute a resonance with the painting.”

Reza Negarestani, the contemporary Iranian philosopher and writer, upon observing Berg’s AGI paintings, has written that they are, “a navigation of the deep ends of the islands of perception and intelligence—alien or otherwise. In this navigation which always belongs to the paradigm of descent in the vein of the post-Copernican paradigm of cosmology, we soon find ourselves in the great fables of isolated islands where to be part of an island means to be part of a resonant field, to be able to hear the shape of the island by listening to the waves. And to be part of a resonant field means we are part of an ocean, i.e., the very system that carries the messages in bottles sub-rosa: We belong to that which is bottomless, that which gravitates us all towards a common end: to fall in the sky.”

Despite recent events, Berg reconstitutes the artistic power of objects to seize our imaginations and rekindle our innate, childlike sense of wonderment of the cosmos. Along with his mirror like sculptures which perform as scientific devises not unlike telescopes or microscopes, his radiant paintings invite us to awaken our perceptions and look into them and ourselves at new horizons.

PUBLIC EXHIBITION PROGRAMS

Adam Berg At Home at the Thomas Lavin Showroom

Friday, April 29 from 3 to 5 PM

You are invited to join Adam Berg and the Thomas Lavin team for an informal gathering to celebrate the installation of Adam Berg: Resonances. The artist will be on hand to welcome viewing of his newest body of works and offer his personal insights. Advanced registration is required, to do so please register here.

Reza Negarestani, Edward Cella and Adam Berg: In Conversation

Sunday, May 15 | 12 Noon (PST)

Join us for a live web-broadcast with philosopher Reza Negarestani from Connecticut; gallerist Edward Cella on location in Berlin, Germany; and artist and educator Adam Berg from Los Angeles for a discussion of Berg’s newest body of paintings and sculptures entitled Resonance. Advance Zoom registration is required, to do so please register here.