Most of the artist’s paintings are large, filling our field of vision like the backlit screen of a computer animation. Recently, her "Computer Game Landscapes" series introduces the viewer to vivid, otherworldly vistas reminiscent of early digital games. In using a traditional medium like oil paint, she confronts the “technical” way that landscape is presented in early computer games, especially the blocky, pixelated artwork made as a result of the low-resolution television and computer screens at the time.
Translating a digital space into an analog medium, she instills each work with the presence of the artist’s hand despite the absence of human presence amongst the scenery. Some compositions appear unsettlingly glitchy where elements have duplicated or gotten stuck, as if time has been paused—until the play button is pressed again. The indefinitely multiplying landscape alludes to the way a player proceeds through a level, each scene regenerating indefinitely until some predetermined goal has been reached. In Tochman’s paintings, the goal has been removed altogether, so one feels uncomfortably at loose ends, stranded.
Kate Mothes, Jacuzzi Error. Exploring the logic of space with Joanna Tochman, "Dovetail Magazine" 2022
Crater lakes
150 x 140 cm, oil on canvas
2020
