CULTURED VOL. II Painting

Artist Nadia Jaber (Spanish, b. 1986) channels the artist as a postdigital algorithm, an online magpie curating a found line, shape, and color to generate an analog version of the digital stream of information. Nadia’s work reflects not just on our visual ADHD but on what the mysterious machines behind social media are making us want, or think we want, and what that means for art appreciation. Her work has been featured in “15 Emerging Female Artists To Invest in Before They Blow Up” selected by Saatchi Art Head Curator Rebecca Wilson, and her paintings have been included in interior design projects featured in AD Spain Magazine. She has participated in the Other Art Fair by Saatchi Art in NY and had a solo show in LA. Also had participated in Art Fairs in Madrid and Mallorca. Nadia Jaber’s paintings jump around, scrolling between textures, flipping tabs into new color palettes and stretching materiality. She riffs between styles and ideas, cutting and scratching them like a DJ would, to curate something entirely new. The eyes and mind can keep up of course, because we’re used to this hyperactive image intake - we do it all day, every day on our phones. Nadia’s work is a full-scale rebellion against the smoke and mirrors of social media, the ultimate collage of the current algorithmic syncretism and acknowledges not only Nadia’s belonging to the digital art revolution, but points rather gratefully to Art’s ultimate dimension, its digital kingdom, where artists thrive, collect, exchange, buy, sell, and perhaps, more definitely, find inspiration and half live. Nobody with their wits about them would question that the art world is increasingly virtual and that its health hasn’t been better in decades. So the question here prays: are technologies to blame or to praise? Andy Warhol, one of the most accomplished ambassadors of appropriation, was ecstatic after discovering the wonders of silk-screening. In one of the fewest interviews available online —omnipotent technology in full bloom— Warhol told to Art News’s reporter Gene Swenson a rather legendary line: «I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody». It was 1962. Warhol anticipated not only the behavior of today’s technologies but the ultimate lust of artists like Nadia, who are openly challenging themselves to become precisely that same technology.