“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible”
Paul Klee
Giuseppe Lupo, who since 2010 assumed the name of Pristowscheg, a maternal last name with which he identifies himself as an artist, was born in Rome, Italy, in 1937. He didn’t study visual arts, he is electronic engineer, graduated from the Università di Padova, Italy, a profession he has practiced in Venezuela, in the field of the metal-mechanical industry, since 1970, the year in which he arrived in that country, where he still resides, in Caracas.
It can be said that in the engineering studies that Pristowscheg made, technically speaking, the closest thing to art is drawing, a graphic language applied in this career, useful for presenting ideas and projects; Added to the drawing, the photography, with which, as a field activity, he began to make records of industrial landscapes, material that he later processes, reworks, and transfigures with artistic intention. In relation to this he says: "A photograph (...) is a very good representation of something that exists, I try to show something that does not exist or that has not been seen yet."
Perhaps his education and experience as an electronic engineer led him to resort to new technologies, to electronic tools, such as the computer, for example, to explore the world of art and express himself through the practice of digital painting, which is characterized for being made uniquely and directly on a computer, using the mouse or digital tablet as a brush, and the monitor or screen as pictorial support.
But as the specialist in information and communication sciences and technology, Diego Levis, says in his book Art and computers: “tools by themselves don’t represent a stimulus for personal creativity, since artistic capacity depends on deeper factors than the mere provision of technology”. Hence, in Pristowscheg, in addition to his interest in science, technology and art, his sensitivity, imagination, talent and creativity play a very important role, essential faculties to be a visual creator, an artist.
Assisted by the computer as an electronic tool, its accessories ─mouse and monitor─ and painting programs, Pristowscheg begins to undress or strip the landscapes he has captured photographically of their surpluses, and thus discovers other visual possibilities in the shapes hidden behind from its initial referent, which is finally transfigured into other images, detached from its original theme, until they become completely abstract, a practice that inevitably leads us to remember the painter Piet Mondrian, founder of Dutch Neoplasticism or Constructivism, who, in his process of transition from figuration to abstraction, he pruned his trees, simplifying their shapes, eliminating their objective content until turning his compositions into vertical, horizontal lines and rectangular planes in red, blue, yellow and black. Abstraction, as the Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero said, "embodies the essence of things and phenomena."
Pristowscheg's abstract digital paintings were initially in black and white, but later, in his interest in the search for a new formal approach, he gave his compositions a chromatic accent, approaching Constructivism, a style that he combines with lyrical Abstraction. The first, is characterized by being objective and calculated, with defined geometric shapes, planned compositions, mathematically structured, cold and rational, impersonal, where expressiveness is totally avoided; therefore, this aesthetic trend is known as geometric abstraction. On the other hand, in the second, created by Kandinsky, the paintings are usually conceived under the orientation of the sensations and the emotional strength of the artist, thus prevailing their expressiveness, subjectivity and spontaneity. There is expressive freedom in it, which is why this trend is defined as expressive abstract art or abstract expressionism, which, although it makes use of geometry, conceives it with a not so defined, irregular appearance, where curved, sinuous lines or organic shapes predominate.
Pristowscheg doesn’t adhere strictly to one of these abstract tendencies, but instead merges them in his digital creative process, achieving a personal style that can be defined as free abstraction, since he has the freedom to move between one aesthetic field and another or in both at the same time. But we could also call it sensitive abstraction, since the aesthetic intention of this artist is that the viewer perceives, feels and enjoys the shapes, the image itself and the colors of his compositions, without the need to stubbornly seek recognizable images in his abstract digital paintings, since, as we mentioned at the beginning, he wants to “show something that does not exist or has not been seen yet”. That is to say, that Pristowscheg intends, in this way, to give another form to reality, to create another reality, or to make visible the essence of what is behind reality, existing or imaginary.
After Pristowscheg makes his digital paintings in his virtual workshop, integrated by the computer, the mouse, and the monitor, he proceeds to materialize his intangible images, formed in principle by a matrix of pixels, by printing on the surface of any pictorial support, such as paper, metal or acrylic, so that, finally, the viewer or collector has access to the present body of his works, repositories of a personal abstract discourse, made up of straight, curved and sinuous lines; juxtaposed and superimposed planes; irregular geometric shapes, stains and expressive colors, contrasting, between warm, bright and cold; visual codes that allude to the essence of things, to the invisible structures of reality.
