scanners, 2023.
animal house fine arts, Melbourne, Australia.

Animal House Fine Arts is pleased to present our much anticipated first solo exhibition with Perth born, Melbourne based artist, Benjamin Barretto.

Barretto's practice revolves around systems, sometimes physical, sometimes digital, sometimes mechanical - often a combination of all three. The work itself often reveals its own system, for instance, in early performance pieces, where sound, vision and movement are combined by feeding various gerry-rigged structures back into each other.

Perhaps an even more obvious example may be Barretto's ongoing series, Painting Paintings, where two independent canvases help define the outcome of the other, forming a perfect circulatory system.

The systems throughout Scanners are less circulatory, more horseshoe. The show takes its name from the process of digital manipulation from which each painting is born, fragments of drawings, images and physical objects are fed through a literal scanner to create the starting point for the compositions, which hold an almost ungraspable visual logic, yet remain held together by Barretto's adept use of colour. The notion of scanning, of course, also refers to our own vision, where patterns develop in and around our peripherals, beyond the focal point (think Terminator), these paintings reflect the feeling - soft edges are often intercepted with hard edges.

Manual turned digital turned manual again - a process within the process, and always teetering on the brink of digital, but not quite. These pictures also find reference in the phenomenon of the JPEG artifact or in digital video, mosquito noise, where a loss of edge clarity and tone occurs as a file becomes compressed, slowly losing its quality as it traverses its way around the world wide web, occasionally to the point of becoming unknowable, but more often than not, just barely.

Knowable and unknowable, confusing and sensible, soft and sharp, the paintings in Scanners are contradictory in nature, yet it is within that very contradiction in which the viewer may find solace, as the edge is where the system becomes unveiled.