Juls Gabs is a painter who dissolves the classical definition of painting and re-applies its significance to address contemporary demands. She explores new figuration through the digital and invents alternative canvases combining traditional and technology-inspired methods.

 

Her work often takes art history and historical ideas as a starting point for digital works that heavily criticise current global sociopolitical practices. The computer is the incubator of ideas and experimentation that produces physical installations with a mix of traditional materials printed or manipulated by digital techniques. In her exploration towards overcoming the surface, the painting is not captured in a rectangle, it becomes a piece in the world. Hinting at classic figuration, Gabs' early influences include French Romanticism and British Pre-Raphaelite painting from Waterhouse and Delacroix, to Whistler and Sargent among others; she transformed this into Loose Figuration and Naïf style on contemporary mediums (digital paintings, electronic devices and installations). But she includes within them a current awareness of times of crisis and ecological disease; and how this has been absorbed and neutralised by working lifestyle and media propaganda. Her works include Hybrid paintings, QR codes, AR public paintings and Google Maps paintings up to electronic devices for performances and sculptures.

 

Gabs keeps exploring new surfaces, shapes and locations to paint the traditional concepts of Nature and Society. As these topics are running towards their decline, it feels essential to reinvent how we talk about and portray them in art. She heavily criticises how economic societies condition our natural assets today in a ‘destructive growth’, as it alienates us from natural instincts and divides us. In the context of criticising the status quo of the capitalist society that puts the capital as its focus, she considers putting one community over the other as anti-deontological that only benefits an artificial hierarchy. In contrast, she believes sustainable technology could help us reconnect with nature through genuine human collaboration.

 

Gabs was born in Spain. As a child, her curiosity expanded the limitations of the paper in her drawings…moving into bigger spaces her parents let her paint with water and a brush onto walls, floors, and objects that would dry when the midday sun hit. She was 4. After studying Fine Arts in Madrid, Gabs started her art career in London. As a young artist, she explored alternative public spaces for creation such as forests, lakes, and buildings and the digital realm. In her eight years in London, the themes of Accessibility and Inclusion became crucial. For her Digital is political, and the best way to promote these two concepts: it provokes accessibility to information and equality. This is why she often works with open-source software and found materials: It is the best way to democratise art and society. 

 

Now she paints her hopes for the future, connecting cultures and offering an arena of non-traditional experimentation that incorporates new perspectives and challenges the ordinary.  Her creations give you a sight of a near future, with the feeling of magical predictions or beliefs. A better tale that we can build.