FLARING FRAGMENTS OF FUTURE PAST

Constant pursuit of new pathways and forms of expression is as ancient as art. Each leap forward, whether the discovery of pigments, the birth of photography or present development of AI, has been propelled by permanent quest for the unknown.
What largely endures, however, is the content: our dialogue with nature and with ourselves, the search for a meaningful spiritual depth, whilst cultural and historical references remain central impulses to creative art.
The fact that distinguishes present-day artists is the unprecedented breadth of available media and tools. Continuous rise of AI offers them a medium that enables them, for the first time ever, approach a quality that has long been reserved for music: liberation from material constraints.

For centuries, European art and philosophy have struggled with the hierarchy of arts, with material being at the heart of the debate. Does painting claim primacy because the act of painting elevates inferior substances? Or should sculpture, which transforms matter into something more valuable, take precedence? Or perhaps it should be music, unique in its immaterial existence, that merits the highest regard, precisely for its fleeting nature?
Generative AI introduces this transience to the visual arts, compelling us to principally examine the classical concept of art as an open-ended process. Flaring Fragments of Future Past navigates the space between emerging possibilities and traditional media. 

The exhibition is a mere fragment of the current caesura in contemporary art. Through the lens of new technologies, it undertakes a form of aesthetic archaeology. Art history revisited.

Christian Holze exemplifies this approach. Describing his practice as appropriation art, he makes the act of taking what already exists a central element of his work. The confrontation of the original and copy drives a continual doubling and merging of the two as a repetitive impulse.
The four times replicated and merged Pietà illustrates this process: familiar historical theme is reimagined in a new medium, forming a transformed work that retains its original cultural and historical roots.
Similar process unfolds in Holze’s wall works. New digital compositions are generated from the colour palette of historical models. Holze then transforms them into artwork with manual painting interventions or an ironic artistic gesture as he puts it. Nonetheless, it is as essential to the understanding of the pieces, as the CHH logo that gives the works value added akin to that of fashion labels or auction houses. The symbol hovers between an analogue watermark and digital aesthetics of stock imagery.

The act of painting lies at the heart of Anna Levinson’s works. She draws from her photographs and objects found online to create paintings on jute. The choice of the background carries a profound significance: its roughly textured surface imbues the paintings with warmth while offering an analogue reference to pixels.
Hands serve as a self-referential theme: in the act of creation, Levinson’s hands are always in view. The same holds for viewers engaging with her works digitally: fingers tracing the screen become an ever-present element within the shifting imagery.
Fragments of fingers in Levinson’s works HA//90/75/MA/CY/2025 and HA//90/75/Y/BR/2025 perform gestures of approximation across the display. Animated surfaces associate motion to the brain, habituated to screen interaction, and the static jute transforms into a fluid pictorial space.

Similarly, Sebastian Hosua’s painting begins with photography, screenshots and drawings. Numerous portrayals of bodies in motion lie scattered across the studio floor, each a source of inspiration or a new point of departure, depending on the perspective. The position of each figure within the room serves as a focal point. Once the final arrangement is established, the transformation unfolds, progressing toward abstraction and, in certain series, utter dissolution.
Yet again, the pursuit of novelty, conveyed through what Hosu calls pure language of painting, drives the creative process. The first line cuts, like a knife through butter, across the canvas layered thickly with paint. The gesture is the culmination of weeks-long preparatory studies. 
Intense Presence, the title of the large-format piece, can equally describe Hosu’s other works on display. The distinctive lines and compositions reveal why the human body remains a potent subject, retaining its significance even millennia after its earliest artistic representations.

The three groups of works by Christian Holz, Anna Levinson and Sebastian Hosua go beyond mere digital production. They draw on traditional, often artisanal techniques, yet are shaped by the aesthetics, logic and rhythms of the digital world.

Though their themes are familiar, their creative processes are marked by a relentless search for new visual languages, approaches and connections with the world. At the intersection of analogue and digital, past and future, their works create spaces charged with tension, where personal, collective and cultural nuances converge.

Each piece is a fragment of a larger aesthetic universe: artistic-historical traces, fragments of human body, echoes of never-ending quest for the new. The fragments are not preserved as static, museum-like objects, but as animate sources within an open-ended process.