Ian Goncharov makes paintings that, like Rauschenberg, borrow data from the outside world. He refers to mass and popular culture as seen through a filter of social media – narratives are forced together like scrolling through a Facebook feed, painted in flat, disrupted planes. Each pictorial element exists in its own shallow optical depth, seemingly disconnected from each other in free floating layers. Since the early twentieth century artists have used collage techniques to piece together disparate visual materials to make something new, this practice being made possible by the emergence of technologies that augmented the production and circulation of images. One century later, through the emergence of new media – and the democratisation of these technologies through home computing, smart phones and portable tech – there has been an exponential growth of images, sounds, words and objects generated or disseminated though digital means. Goncharov’s compositions suggest the principles of copy, cut and paste that underpin the transfer of knowledge and visual matter in the Information Age, merging images and cultural genres. Goncharov makes comparisons between his process as a painter and the DJ in Hip Hop, whereby he ‘samples’ images from mass culture and ‘mixes’ them in paintings. We experience the distinct graphic elements not as one holistic image, but as detached compilations of layered subjects and surfaces.

Merge Visible brings together a group of British painters who combine multiple visual elements or processes, enabling many fragments of information to be seen simultaneously in one assimilated painted image. They engage with techniques of layering and juxtaposition as a means of exploring the materiality of paint, creating new meaning from disparate forms and disrupting the syntax of pictorial composition.

‘Merge Visible’ is an action in Photoshop whereby separate layers are compressed together to make one unified image. This flattening of pictorial elements into a consolidated viewpoint is symptomatic of our everyday experiences in the contemporary image world, in which a constant stream of rapidly shared simulacra enter our consciousness hundreds of times each day on television, computer and phone screens. In his 1435 treatise on painting, ‘De pictura’ (English: ‘On Painting’) Leon Battista Alberti declared his consideration of the frame of the painting as ‘an open window through which I see what I want to paint.’ Today we are used to seeing multiple windows at the same time, and through them we fluidly experience a stream of pixelated images. We are living at a time when the virtual space of the digital screen is the prevailing means by which we view and understand the world – often seeing several ‘windows’ at once full of images, icons and texts which can all have their own individual temporal, spatial, and aesthetic registers. Within the scope of our vision these disparate components are given meaning in relation to each other, coming together into a perceptual meta-logic.

The artists shown in Merge Visible do not execute their work using digital imaging techniques, but instead construct the pictorial experience in similar ways, bringing traditional painterly tropes into dialogue with our experiences of reading space, material and subject in the contemporary image world. The digital environment has influenced the way in which we understand pictorial conventions; the layered logic of Photoshop has affected our comprehension of colour, depth and volume, its painting tools our recognition of a distinct quality of line, and the multitude of windows visible on our computer screens at one time has normalised fragmented spatial composition – all of which relate to the formal considerations that lead to an artist’s application of paint to surface. In our cut-and-paste culture the combination of numerous painterly elements is both symbolic of an ever-generating visual environment and simultaneously transcends it, reinforcing the physical textures and haptic qualities of the painted surface as a contrast to the dematerialised space of the screen. The paintings included in Merge Visible are at once suggestive of our vast yet disembodied relationships with the image in the digital age, yet they remain manifestly ‘painterly’ in nature.