In his artistic practice, Quayola speculates on new forms of landscape painting, reflecting on how technology is rapidly transforming the way we observe and perceive the world around us. As our collective vision becomes increasingly mediated by digital processes that enhance, filter, and distort reality, the boundaries between the real and the artificial, the physical and the digital, continue to blur.

As a response to this evolving condition, Quayola draws a parallel with late 19th-century landscape painters who sought new visual languages to explore and depict nature. Similarly, he conducts systematic observations of natural landscapes and phenomena—yet his approach is mediated by advanced technological apparatuses and computational strategies that augment human perception and capabilities.

Natural landscapes become the subject of algorithmic dissection, where botanical forms are deconstructed into minimal units: shifting palettes and moving pixels. Though inclined toward abstraction, this process of visual synthesis remains deeply connected to the pictorial heritage. On the surface of the screen—treated as a digital canvas—clusters of matter and pixelated brushstrokes emerge, revealing their digital materiality and a new kind of algorithmic gesturality.

Within Quayola’s practice lies a sensation of sublime estrangement: the works feel both familiar—deeply rooted in a long-standing pictorial tradition—and alien, as they are produced through tools and methods foreign to classical painting.

The exhibition Dissected Palette features two core series that articulate Quayola’s research: Pleasant Places and Pointillisme. Both were developed through a series of field data recordings in the Provençal countryside—landscapes that inspired generations of artists throughout the 19th century.

Pleasant Places is an homage to the pictorial tradition of landscape, composed of a series of digital paintings that explore the threshold between representation and abstraction.

Pointillisme, by contrast, is a celebration of the machine’s inherent inability to fully capture the complexity of natural data. Using high-precision laser scanning, Quayola attempts to translate the arboreal forms of the Provençal forests—but instead creates an ode to error, where gaps, distortions, and ruptures become expressive material.

As curator Lucia Longhi writes, “Today, landscape is no longer what we observe only with our eyes: it is an image arising from the merging of human and non-human gaze. The artist plunges into nature in pursuit of that image: a vision mediated by technology.”

In his paintings, Quayola continues to blur and dissolve the visual fidelity of the landscape. As the image disintegrates before our eyes, it raises fundamental questions about our technologically mediated relationship with reality itself.