Urban culture is building strong bonds with digital art and, above all, with post-digital art. It makes sense much beyond the (obvious) conviction that the cultural manifestations that emerge in one same temporary painting tend to go together much better with others that find themselves in different eras. In this way, the trap aesthetic goes extremely well with the proto-3D that digital imagery brings to the present day. But we need to question this formula: that these manifestations are so close to us and they interweave so naturally, does it imply that there can’t be other possible interrelationships?
MARK TENNANT, URBAN IMPRESSIONISM
Is it necessary to accept that post-digital art has ownership of the representation of urban culture? Consciously or unconsciously, Mark Tennant makes us believe otherwise. And his oil paintings demonstrate it.
Mark Tennant probably doesn’t listen to trap and his art couldn’t be more classic. He was trained in such traditional institutions as Baltimore’s Mayland Institute College of Art or the New York Academy of Art. And he was even the director of the Graduate’s degree in Painting of the San Francisco Art Academy. His paintings have been exhibited in spaces that are so far from modernity as the Salon d’Automne in Paris. And yet, here we are, fascinated by some of Tennant’s most recent works of art.
It might be that his starting point is the conception of oil paintings that has a lot to do with impressionism and with the capturing of light and movement of certain vanguards from the beginning of the 20th century. His works of art are composed through wide brushstrokes and areas of colours that are the opposite of realism and that convey implicit emotions in the colours and shapes. And still, it turns out that such an old technique (and, let’s face it, also overused) is illustrating some of the portraits of urban and youth culture, especially to do with girls, that have been the most interesting in the past few years.
In great part, in his recent work, the artist captures in the best way possible the energy of urban life. Girls and (sometimes) boys with generic faces that exude an ambiguous but contagious beauty. Far from being the precepts of the digital and post-digital worlds, totally anchored in ancestral techniques, Mark Tennant proves that, sometimes, his faraway point of view can illustrate fascinating visions of such a specific fact as urban culture.
