Dichotomic 2019-4 Painting

For Dichotomic (lit., two states opposed), Adelmann engineers an ongoing sequence of paintings that explore a struggle between human- and digital-born forms of creativity and the idea of formulaically deriving abstraction from previous abstraction. The struggle is apparent in the forced warping of the imagery, while the artists hand is evident in the thick paint and immense brush strokes.The work entails digital manipulation of previous work, using that imagery as reference to paint a second order work, which then is once more documented and distorted to produce reference imagery for a third painting, and so on. The process relates to a derivative equation, and acts in itself as a kind of visual proof of the previous painting that it came from. Physically speaking, the warped reference imagery is both a guide and a constraint- requiring at times the use of very large brushes and forceful mark making techniques. The result falls in-between the painters hand and the demands made by the digital distortion.