More critics :: Paul-David-Redfern-artista-digitale

2016-Palermo

2019
DARIO TONANI
Ruote classiche n° 362, (ED Editoriale Domus) - Febbruary 2019

"My art drowned in a texture"

Born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1958, Paul David Redfern has lived and worked for some time in Italy (in Gorizia), where in 2014 he was awarded the title of Knight of the Republic for artistic merits. His passion for classic cars - he is a happy owner of two historic Fiat 500''s - led him, in 1994, to develop an evocative artistic project called "Photomorfosi". He talking about it himself: "They are digital photomanipulations, in short, I make my works with only three tools: an iMac, a digital camera and Photoshop." What actually makes his creations particularly suggestive is the massive use of the so-called graphic textures, which suggest the illusion that the subject is painted on a real surface, such as wood, tin or stone, instead of on the computer . "The observer" explains to us, "can easily imagine that what he sees is a real object, rather than a digital image represented by a sequence of bits". To further characterize his "paintings", always in lead colors and with a wide use of the rust effect, there are hidden figures in the composition that require careful and prolonged observation between games of overlapping and transparencies to be identified. Try to find them! A way to invite the viewer to enter the world of the artist. But above all an original form of understanding digital processing, which normally plays everything on immediacy and impact. His subjects are icons from the thirties onwards, sporty but also utilitarian notes, contextualized with contemporary graphic and advertising elements to the subject

2014-Kristal

2016

D.SSA BARBARA ROMEO-Palermo
Critic and art historian, Palazzo Francavilla - Palermo

... The idea that his art is the bearer of high artistic, cultural and aesthetic values, as well as the indisputable technical skill resulting from work and in-depth study, makes his works admirable and worthy of note. Works like his are a beautiful and pleasant stop in the monotony of the Italian artistic scene, and we want to highlight all the peculiarities of a laborious artistic career ...I

2013-1 click

2014

ANAMARIJA STIBILJ šANJ -Bohinj (Slovenia)
Critic and art historian, 6. Mednaroda likovna kolonija Kristal - Bohinj - (catalog)

Paul David Redfern is one of the pioneers of Italian digital photography. The photographic image is for him a document, a testimony of time, space, people, events; it is, in short, the "capture" of the moment. But, at the same time, it is also an expressive language and a personal relationship with the visual reality. However, his creative process does not end here. In the computer he watches, all inserted in a new creative context, the possibility of simulating "writing with light", the discovery of the creative spirit, the realization of twinkling ideas. The computer is the tool that allows him to translate his idea into a new image: true, multifaceted, unique, original and visually interesting and convincing. The creative play of new motifs is directed by his artistic mind and by his extreme artistic sensibility. This sensitivity conduct him to the discovery of painting and graphics, techniques "observed" for more than a decade. This type of artistic experience, accompanied by new techniques and technologies, has introduced Redfern to an interesting and exciting trip that has accompanied him to the design of works that represent real visual sensations. From the technical support, the essential interface, the borned works testify that they are based on a very high artistic component. The author's approach is always highly artistic as he is a true master of color, space and light, lines and shapes, structures, complex compositions and textures. In the design of his digital collages, the figures are made with complex overlays of textures and various weaves. In them, this is the scenario that the artist creates, at the same time both the intimate and the artistic look are reflected, we feel the image as a medium based on a solid artistic foundation, which lives the freedom of ideas. The images of Paul David Redfern are a harmonious synthesis, they follow the author's concept and, fundamental thing, they keep his representation clear. Carefully observing the specifications of the new creative environment, Redfern has, in relation to the interior-exterior, found an interesting "raw material" of various elements, linking them in an inseparable "unicum" where each fragment enjoys its own artistic life.

2013-The Raibl!

2013

ELIANA MOGOROVICH - Gorizia
"Photomorfosi - Ritratti dell'anima"
Critic, The time of 1 clic! Civic Museum of Territory, Cormòns (GO) - (catalog)

Time that escapes us, that chases us, that we pursue. Time that runs, rarely walks, passes quickly, never passes. The time that - according to a proper rhythm, different for each and every phase of life - proceeds. And it proceeds anyway, regardless of our will and our being ready for what it will bring. We can not stop it except in an image that will perhaps be able to give us back the emotions that have accompanied it. And to succeed, even now that we are overwhelmed by the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, ipad, and even now, to be able to hold back we must resort to an "ancient" tool like the camera. Because even if compared to only ten, five or two years ago, the models and potential of cameras are different and constantly evolving, the basic principle remains the same: press a button (today simply touch it) to hear that precious click. The moment that separates the flow of existence from its imperishable memory. Accompanying cell phones, today life seems to know an expansion of moments to be immortalized and shared. But this complicity guaranteed by technology risks trivializing the moment and the medium used, almost endorsing the thesis of those who interpret photography as the art of series b, a conviction born from the idea that both the machine and not the artist to conceive and that seems to be supported by the parsimony with which the photographic exhibitions are musealized, finding rather space in places not assigned to art such as public places, cellars, some private galleries. "The time of a click" goes against the current. Like the object to which it is dedicated - photography, in fact, wants to eternal precise moments, so the exhibition intends to elevate some authors and their works from the visual chaos that surrounds us with the artistic quality of their work that, although sanctioned by the set up in a museum, is not certified by this location but by the methods of realization of these images, works for which the click is only the starting point, and perhaps it is also the less exciting. While in fact for amateur photographers shooting is the landing of an emotion, for Paul David Redfern the shot is just the beginning: the beginning of an artistic adventure, of a constant test to test the technical capabilities of the chosen procedure and the communicativeness of what has been immortalized. And the emotion, with that click prepared, studied, meditated, does not stop: rather, it begins to free itself. Individual stories that can be transformed into one, continuous narration are the Photomorfosi by Paul David Redfern. Inserted in the cycle "Portraits of the soul" to which the author works since 2010, these works presuppose the intellectual and emotional closeness between the author and the model. It is only by knowing the character, the passions, the world in which the protagonists of his shots move that the artist manages to surround them with fragments of their daily life, immortalized individually in photographs that are subsequently superimposed and finally reworked to the computer in order to simulate the pictorial effect. The actual instantaneousness of the click expands in the long post-production process that allows the previous experience of Redfern in the world of graphics and collage to emerge in a clear way. Similar to advertising panels, these works are the best means of communicating that photography is not something fleeting and light: it is Art that implies and tempera dexterity and concept.

2012-Soul's portratits

2013

ERMES IVO BUZZI - Tarvisio
"The Raibl!"
Architect, Videocube-Raibl multimedia installation whit Photomorfosi, Cave del Predil (UD)

"The Raibl!" Art installation Videocube-Raibl 2013-and Gallery-Photomorfosi Mine / Pictures
This installation consists of a polyhedron (red cube 2 × 2x2 meters, the 2 × 2 dimension was the typical section of the shearing tunnel for the cultivation of the mineral), within which a photo-movie dedicated to the mine, with the title: "The Raibl- Free interpretation of life in the mine" and 13 canvas-print 50 × 70 also dedicated to the mine and miners of Cave del Predil. "The Raibl!" is the result of an artistic meeting between the digital artist Paul David Redfern and architect Ermes Ivo Buzzi in spring 2011 in Gorizia. The video "The Raibl!" is a creation of artists Giuseppina Mastrovito and Paul David Redfern
.... To this end Redfern visited Cave, the mine and its hypogeum and realized both the video and the "photomorphic" digital images on the specific mining environment of Cave del Predil: miners intent on processing typical of mining tradition. They are particular images with complex basic backgrounds, performed with a personal technique whit combination of deteriorated surfaces by time and degradation: old plasters, oxidized ferrous surfaces, aged wood and consumed by atmospheric agents etc ...

2010-Fotoincontro

2012
LORELLA KLUN - Trieste
"Paul David Redfern - Portraits of the soul"
SkupinArt photographic exhibition, Bucuie (GO) - (catalog)

The "portraits of the soul" born from a conceptual and cultural operation, presented with the style and refined qualities that over the years have become the hallmark of this author, one of the pioneers of digital techniques. For this project, destined to grow over time, Redfern approaches characters who have left their trace in the cultural world of Italy, Austria, Slovenija and Croatia: he photographs the statues or portraits, then rework them and imprint them on a rich texture composition. The process uses one of the salient features of photography, namely the preservation of memory, but amplifies it with modern stratification and assembly techniques. Portraits of portraits then seem to regain life through the roughness of the trunk and the roughness of old plasters; the warm sandy deposits do not hide, but enhance the salient features of the characters, their physiognomy resume volume, revealing fragments of their experience, reinvigorating the eternal breath of the soul and keeping alive the memory of what they were, are wrote and realized.

2008-codexM

2010

JASNA MERKU' - Trieste
"Paul David Redfern - Photomorfosi"
12° Fotoincontro , photograpfic exhibition Tir gallery , Nova Gorica (Slovenia) - (catalog)

Paul David Redfern's Photomorphosis cycle offers continuous development opportunities. We can note continuity with the production of the previous period in which, since the mid-seventies, the author used traditional means and methods of expression, especially graphics and collage. Redfern starts from the pictorial expression and returns to it even when he later arrives at the digital technique, with his countless processing possibilities offers, he accepted this as a new stimulus. Redfern operates between tradition and innovation, but he always remaining faithful to itself and authentic. It denotes its autonomy in the technical approach that allows it to develop the different phases of the creative process up to the final digital print, it remains autonomous even when drawing the motifs from the dream-like and fantastic world. The theme of the representation of the sea depths, of mysterious beings, of brightly colored veils and modulations of fine graphic workmanship is developed through suggestive pictorial solutions, obtained entirely with the digital processing of photographs. The overlaps create particular effects of depth and accentuate the surreal dimension, which metaphorically sees the emergence of the profound exploration, understood also as exploration by the artist of original visual associations. What most attracts the viewer is the visual story steeped in sweetness and with a strong emotional charge.

2002-Fotocomputer

2008

LORELLA KLUN - Trieste
"codexM"
10° Fotoincontro photographic exhibition Kulturni dom (GO) - (catalog)

"The matrix once had reminded him of the protein bonds of individual specialized cells.
Then you could throw yourself and glide, adrift, high speed, completely involved but completely separate, and all around you the dance of business, information that interacted with each other, data that became flesh in the labyrinths of the black market ... "
William Gibson, "The neuromancer"

What would a scribe do for a walk in time? Having assimilated the iconographic method and the ideographic method, capable of rendering the idea of an object or of a thought with an abstract sign, in its search for Knowledge, it would lead to phonetic writing. Gradually replacing stylus and clay tablets with calamuses and inks, then the sheepskin in use at Pergamum would give way to the fragile smoothness of the paper. Finally, on the shores of our neurocentric society, it would abandon inks and brushes, dazzled by mice and graphic tablets; thirsty traveler, would slide between constellations of data, to plunge into the collective memory button of Cyberspace. He would then update his codes, transforming illuminated caplets in symbols and logos and thus crossing the spatio-temporal paradoxes of a gigantic ring of Moebius. In the glittering network of references, Paul David Redfern has been a navigator of the first hour: for years he has intertwined images with strings of data, bending complex designs of bits to his design. His latest work, "CodexM" wants to be a short circuit between the memory of the Past and a present in the balance between conflicting impulses. In his images appear fragments of codes - surfaced by media eroded by time - that interpenetrate with the iconographic signs of our age. Of the Supreme Artifice remains a dense shadow that hangs over the graphism of the faces, on the symbols and on the new Babel, mixed in the capable belly of the Matrix. And when it comes to bringing concreteness to the deluge of data, here is the sand and the stone can make the new alchemy, retaking the stretch marks of time and forging the key to entry to a New World.

2001-Computerarts

2002

MASSIMO PATTI - Milano
" Photomorfosi real and virtual"
Fotocomputer n°43 (italian magazine of digital photography)

Literally from the Greek, photomorphosis means "metamorphosis of photography"; in this gallery of Paul Redfern you can understand, better than with a thousand words, the exact meaning of the term.
... Redfern through the computer reworks his photographs, brings his real images into a virtual territory that mixes them, combines them in a fantastic way, makes them relive in impossible places: a bit like what happens in the dream, where the point of departure is almost always a real fact, but the context in which it takes shape is completely invented. The virtuality of his work allows him to create new colors, modify the forms in a sort of new technological metaphysics: this is the meaning of his "Photomorfosi".

2000-Sala della torre

2001

C.C. - Millano
"The art of Photomorfosi: discovering this original art form created by Paul Redfern"
Computerarts (Italian magazine for digital art)

Paul Redfern is certainly one of the most active artists in the field of digital graphics ...According to Agfa, which publishes an important series of Photomorphosis images, some examples of which we see on this page, these works deserve a place in the history of photography.

1999-La repubblica

2000
ISABELLA FRANCO - Gorizia
"Original exhibition of digital photographs by Paul David Redfern in the space Della Torre - Hi-tech works wrapped in the Middle Ages"
Messaggero Veneto (daily newspaper)

What are the boundaries of art? What are the extremes of the means of expression? At the time of Giotto and Cimabue, the maximum probable outcome consisted of attempts at a perspective representation of reality and the study of chromatic compositions as much as possible to the truth. From those conquests art, the classic means of expression of human sensitivity, have made giant steps, to arrive, nowadays, real experiments that have far exceeded the boundaries of what until recently it was unimaginable. These are the premises for the work of Paul David Redfen, an artist from Gorizia of American origin who, after years of experimentation in the field of traditional photography, has arrived at digital photography, transforming the classic canons of that sector ...
... Twenty color images on rigid support with a strong visual impact represent the transformation of digital photography, the result of the harmonic combination of the camera and the computer. The products are forms, figures, appearances, which evoke feelings of omnipotence, a sense of absolute mastery of the technological means by the artist and his thousand potentialities. The expertise and professionalism, in this case, are embodied in hi-tech works that bear the sensibility and the vague sense of the dream of a medieval landscape.

1999-Gazzetta Cral

1999

ROBERTO MUTTI - Milano

"Paul David Redfern - Digital Photomorfosi "
Critic, La Repubblica-Tutto Milano, n°158, 29/4-5/5

... One of the most interesting and innovative themes affront in photography in recent years is connected to the digital image that is using, in one or more stages of processing, the computer. The American Redfern, from Gorizia, proposes here some of his works realized with Photoshop, a program that allows starting from a traditional photograph to modify it in a radical way; the twenty photos on display allow us to analyze the procedure but also to understand that the most interesting authors know how to go beyond the pure technique to build a new expressive language.

1998-Contemporanea98

1999
ALEX DADI - Milano
"Photomorfosi"
Gazzetta Cral (magazine)

The exhibition includes about 20 color images, with a strong visual impact, that represent the "transformation" of traditional photography into digital, constituting the most interesting example of how harmoniously combining the camera with the computer can be obtain artistic results of great value ..

1997-Applicando

1998

FRANCA MARRI - Gorizia
"Multimedial art"
Critic and art historian, Contemporanea98 (catalog)

For Paul David Redfern and Mauro Mauri, the technological media, the computer, is an extra tool, a further medium. Redfern through the computer reworks his photographs, brings his real images into a virtual territory that mixes them, combines them in a fantastic way, makes them relive in impossible places: a bit like what happens in the dream, where the starting point is almost always a real fact, but the context in which it takes shape is completely invented. The virtuality of his work allows him to create new colors, modify the forms in a sort of new technological metaphysics: this is the meaning of his "Metamorphosis" (Photomorphosis) ...

1996-Eurart

1997

LUCA ROMOLI - Cinisello Balsamo (MI)
"Happy new year is seen from January"
Applicando n°137, January (Italian magazine for computer Apple)

... a series of works by Paul David Redfern, entitled "Photomorfosi": traditional photographs manipulated on the computer. David, shows how that are not needed exorbitant machines for the realization of artistic works. In fact he works on a MacIIFX equipped with only 17 Mb of Ram ...

1996-Progresso fotografico

1996
ENZO SANTESE - Trieste
" Paul David Redfern - Photomorfosi"
Critic and art historian, EurArt (catalog)

The interactive relationships between creativity and electronics engage the artist on multiple levels and develop in the work a syntax between direct procedure and instrumental intervention. The mediation of the computer in Paul David Redfern amplifies the power of decomposing reality, entrusted to black and white photographs. In this way, architectural details, vegetal realities, glimpses of landscape, details of things subjected to a sort of magnifying glass are the starting point for an unpredictable expressive impulse in its finished outcomes, thanks to the amount of possible modifications in the urn telematics "; Redfern - on the basis of a long practice with graphic and photographic experimentation - digitally processes images that suspend the real on the threshold of a sometimes ambiguous readability: in the conspicuous margin between the instant idea and its immersion in the computer there is a series of expressive options that culminate in combined solutions of form, deconstructed from its original logic and revived for a purely aesthetic purpose, and color, lit on warm tones to give greater relief to the two polarities of the work: the severity of black and white and the exultation of the chromatic intervention. The work of Redfern has a value above all, that of keeping the artist intact to asservism to the technique, which dominates in all its articulations, and free to grasp the telematic in the results that fully represent him in all his works.

1994-The eye, the camera and the computer

1996
GUIDO MARIA GATTEGNO - Milano
"Digital Photomorfosi"
Progresso Fotografico (Italian magazine about photography)

To create his images, which he baptized "Photomorfosi" or transformation of photography, Paul David Redfern uses a personal computer. The choice of the computer, a machine considered by some "cold" par excellence, was felt by him at first as a challenge, as a means to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve and obtain the "hot" images, as a result. On the other hand he openly declares that he will never abandon the use of the traditional camera, an instrument that he considers closely connected to digital photography, and that he should never exaggerate the use of digital effects, only by combining photography and computer in a harmonious way artistically valid result, in fact at the base of the act there is always the human mind and not the instrument. In support of his thesis he cites the designer Fabio Smotlak: "The use of new information technology by artists poses a fundamental problem: how to make use of the versatility of information technology while avoiding the expressive flattening that such technologies can induce. It is to be believed that only a right creative tension between the two poles, the technological one and the one of the expressive need for man, can produce art as expression and communication "

1994-Photomorfosi

1994

FABIO SMOTLAK - Trieste (TS)
"Photomorfosis: the eye, the camera and the computer" (catalog)
Designer and visual operator

The expressive function is a necessity for man: it means a personal liberation or a communicative function. One of the classic means of expression is painting and drawing to which, in our century, there are other expressive techniques such as collage, photography, cinema, etc. Some exponents of the avant-garde art of this century are particularly emblematic in the passage of the "classic" expressive means to the new means that also use techniques and materials of industrial production. For example, I mention the artists Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp as exponents of the Dadaist movement; László Moholy-Nagy, painter, visual researcher and designer, Man Ray painter and American photographer who has produced profound consequences in the art of his country. It is also a duty to cite the artist from Trieste, Augusto Cernigoj, a student of the Bauhaus and a bearer of the artistic avant-gardes in our region (editor's note: Friuli Venezia Giulia). In fact, it is in this line that we find the premises for the work of Paul David Redfern. The American origins of the artist reflect the interest and aesthetic sensibility associated with modern technology. It was not by chance that, precisely in America, the transition from the natural environment to the technological environment took place more rapidly and more traumatically than in Europe. It should also be considered that the artist grows up and is culturally formed in a city like Trieste, full of contradictions and suspended between a culturally cosmopolitan past and a border town present. The experiences and the different influences that the artist absorbs, as well as the search for his own identity, form the context of his artistic work. It is premature to give resolutive evaluations because I consider the aesthetic research of Paul David Redfern still "young" and in a phase of strong development. His research proceeds in parallel with the development of new photographic and computer technologies. They are the basis of the images that the artist proposes. In the artistic production of Paul David Refern we can identify two salient phases: the first phase (1975 - 1992) that could be defined as expressive research and the second phase (from 1993) as an aesthetic expression of the technological image. In the first phase the artist uses a multifaceted approach to the image: through a "hybrid" technical process he pursues a highly formal result. In these works the artist oscillates between pure photography and the various graphic-photographic elaborations that the optical-chemical procedure of photographic technique suggests. In addition, compositional procedures of Dadaist derivation are used such as collage and assemblage, as well as images obtained by dia-sandwich prints and computer graphics. If we analyze the language of the proposed images, we note that the author uses different visual and iconic codes for their formation. It also uses compositional structures and figures of speech (similitude, metaphor, irony-humor, etc.) typical of visual communication and in particular of advertising. The characterizing aspect of the work of Paul David Redfern in this period is therefore the research on the techniques and languages of the image. This research is a meta-linguistic reflection as it verifies its own operative procedure and its own image code. In the second phase of the work, Redfern uses the processing and expressive possibilities of the computer. The artist creates a synthetic image by electronically processing photographic images. The procedure consists in storing in the computer memory a photographic image which is then electronically decomposed into its constituent elements: shapes, colors, meanings, etc. The artist recomposes the elements thus obtained in new images with completely aesthetic purposes. The described procedure is at the base of the images called "Photomorphosis". These images are presented to the user with a paradoxically pictorial aspect or collage paintings. They are images that we could call them "hot" and hide from those who look at them the high technological complexity necessary to form them. The use of new technologies by aesthetic operators poses a fundamental problem: how to make use of the versatility of information technology while avoiding the expressive flattening that these technologies could induce. It is to be considered that only a right creative tension between the two poles, the technological one and that of the expressive necessity of man, can produce art as expression and communication. Paul David Redfern, creatively accepting the challenge, tries to give his answer.

1994
CRISTINA VISINTIN - Monfalcone (GO)
Messaggero Veneto (Daily newspaper)

... The use of informatics is for him (Paul David Redfern) authentic and profound passion: the computer, no longer cold "machine", becomes for Redfern an instrument with great potential for extrinsecation. The choice of the subjects to be portrayed and elaborated is the same as that of a painter in front of the canvas: everything that stimulates fantasy is captured ...

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