GAME ART: IAN WILLIAMS' "VIDEOGAME" PAINTINGS

Ian Williams uses a traditional medium, painting, to redefine and rethink the aesthetics of gaming. His work is the outcome of a complex process involving three-dimensional computer modelling and paint, screens and canvases. His process is simultaneously simple and complex: the artist extract elements from a video game and removes the two dimensional textures that adorn polygons. He then investigates the essence of such objects by painting them on a canvas. The result is truly original as the objects depicted are barely recognizable as elements of the original virtual prop. Williams's entire oeuvre is an expanding visual archive of 3D objects. As Darryn Ansted writes, Williams  "explores the metaphysics of computer games". The game is stripped bare of all its alluring graphics and then fixed on a flat surface forever. It's a remarkable reinvention of the still life genre. As the curator suggests,

His procedure allows him to leave behind the content of the game and foreground the work of the ‘physics engine’. This is essentially an algorithm designed by a computer programmer, or team of computer programmers, whose role in the game is like that of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. They make ‘things’ in the game look like they exist. The algorithm makes an object in the game appear to have a ‘surface’, to obey gravity and more broadly to interact in a Newtonian manner, like things in our world. Put simply, the paintings result from investigating how a computer game makes a 2 dimensional surface appear to have 3 dimensions—but Williams then problematizes it. (Darryn Ansted, 2019)