Galleria Bianconi is delighted to announce Jonas Lund’s debut solo exhibition at the gallery, FOR YOU, opening on the 7th October, a digitally enhanced installation choreographed FOR YOU but also by you. Paintings, lights, plants, fans and screens have been programmed to please you in an algorithmically curated experience responding to your own engagement with art. Echoing the ever-increasing personalization of content on your favorite social media, aimed at making you smile and stay online a little bit longer than you expected to, the exhibition will be in a permanent state of update, offering a continuously changing composition to best match your taste.
The paintings themselves reflect, in their patterns, the idea of successful artwork that is dear to Lund. Indeed, they are composed as clever mosaics of other paintings that sold fairly well at auctions.
But the ongoing inquiry of the artist into this assessment of success does not stop to the painted surface. Each picture records its own performance metrics and shares this data with you when you get closer to it. Near Field Communication, the same technology that enables contactless payments on your credit card, allows you to access this meta narrative of the painting’s life, usually as unfathomable as the complexity of the algorithms that rule our online lives.
For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Jonas Lund tailored an experience just FOR YOU. Over the years, the Swedish artist has made a habit of embedding the audience reception in his artworks, thus giving his œuvre its place in a thousand years old history while addressing the most contemporary questions.
If historically the mediation of emotions and their reception in the arts was mainly a concern regarding the influence those emotions stirred in the audience would have over the non-artistic world—the generally accepted idea by then being that the less powerful the better—, nowadays, our emotions simply fuel capitalism.
It is no secret that your social media feeds are curated just FOR YOU, that the ads that are served to you online are purposefully targeting you, that the information presented to you may not be presented to your family, all that with the aim of triggering a reaction from you.
As far back as 2013, Jonas Lund developed a software to track and analyse the movements of visitors in an exhibition to study the attention received by the artworks on display. The following year, he devised “VIP (Viewer Improved Painting)”, a digital abstract painting presented on two screens that were constantly optimizing their compositions based on input from the gaze tracker placed between the screens, in order to attain “the most attention-grabbing composition.”
The artist is also well-known for decentralizing his own practice by way of a token earned or acquired by those wishing to become his art shareholders and get agency over his important decisions.
