all videos: BlackBerry Paintings, 2010-2012 (ongoing)
© MILTOS MANETAS

–

MILTOS MANETAS is a greek painter, digital artist and theorist currently based in Rome. A pioneer of internet and videogame art, MANETAS is the founder of Neen, an Internet-based art movement, introduced in May 2000 at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC. Through his electronicOrphanage platform, he has put together projects such as the WhitneyBiennial.com (2002) and the first Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennial (PadiglioneInternet, 2009).

MANETAS is currently working on a series of invisible paintings (Blackberry Paintings) that challenges the concept of reality using one of today’s most widespread means of communication: a smartphone.

There is a fundamental error in painting-in every school of painting- that has existed until today: we are always painting on a plane that’s different from the plane of reality. We either paint on a canvas or some other support that is positioned in parallel or in front of the world, we never paint over reality itself, we never paint reality.

That was to change for me after I had a recent accident in 2010, when I went down 40 meters from the top of a rock on my back with a little tree, finally saving my life. After a month of immobility in the hospital, I returned to that same place where I had the accident and I rent a little house there. Waiting to recover completely, I had my colors and canvasses brought there but I couldn’t paint: regular painting just didn’t seamed a good idea anymore. Finally, one day that I took a brush and without any color on it, I started “painting” over the landscape. I felt that I was making an invisible painting. A few days after my “discovery”, I keeping my Blackberry on my left head, I start filming whatever it was that I was painting. A Blackberry and a brush was now all that I needed for a studio. That’s how the BLACKBERRY PAINTINGS were born and from that moment, I decide to continue my life by painting it at the same time. – MILTOS MANETAS for Purple

And good news: MILTOS MANETAS. After Blackberry Paintings is currently on view at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome until December 30, 2012

–

–