Catharsis

Inspiration

                               Catharsis #126 - Lost in the Stars This project was born with a challenge in mind: To write an algorithm capable of generating digital art that doesn’t feel geometric at all.
My main inspiration was the abstract expressionism movement and artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline. What I admire from them is how they managed to communicate intense emmotions only with colour and gesture, freeing themselves from form, from shape, from subject, from perspective... basically from the imitation of reality.
That is why it was important to me that Catharsis was not a reproduction of one artist's style. What I wanted was to use their techniques, but use them to communicate the same kind of emotions that I feel when I'm in front of an artwork from my favourite artists.

Catharsis is a project about the communication of emotions.
When you are in front of an artwork that moves you and it is difficult to find words to express those feelings, those are the emotions I want to communicate in this project.

999 artworks. 999 titles

Each and every artwork presents an individual and unique title, inspired by the most influential jazz pieces. I consider these titles help the artworks to gain depth and meaning and provide a closer relationship with the artwork.

Chaos and control

For me, art must convey a feeling. With Catharsis I seek to empower the viewer in front of a fresh picture, full of energy and passion, produced after a creative delirium similar to a catharsis.
Improvisation, gesture, liberation...
In the rhythm of the work, you can perceive the tension between containment and lack of control.

Here the term ‘improvisation’ fits better than ‘randomness’. My work is to design a symphony of great dimensions and then let the software improvise on each piece, deciding where the improvisation leads. Beforehand I can't predict if the piece is going to be a melodic passage or a drum-solo percussive collision.

The whole project moves permanently around a delicate balance between control and chaos.
Too much control and it becomes lifeless.
Too much chaos and it becomes meaningless.

                               Catharsis #742 - Indian Summer

Between realism and abstraction

A particular feature of this project is its realistic approach to abstraction, where traditionally both concepts have always been considered polar opposites in art studies. The eye is invited to endlessly explore the hundreds of random and beautiful small accidents that give the paint a physical experience. The canvas fabric, the drops, the splashes, the “impasto”, the lumps of thick paint, all take on a tangible quality intended to draw the viewer into an abstract state of mind.

The frames

Some artworks randomly present a white frame, others don’t. But when the frame apprears, the paint spills violently and uncontrollably invading the frame, questioning the canvas limits and incorporating the frame into the artwork itself.

The color palettes

Catharsis presents 16 different color palettes. All of them have been meticulously selected and adjusted to provide variability to the collection but, more important, generate captivating images, classy, deco, with the imprint of a work of art, with a strong pictorial condition which would maintain a design or contemporary art museum look.

The color palettes take their titles from the suggestive names of oil paint tubes, such as "Cadmium Scarlett” or “Titanium White”.

Pale Sienna	Cobalt Turquoise	Charcoal Light Grey + Indigo Blue	Naples Orange
Cadmium Scarlet	Indian Yellow	Chromium Oxide Green	Pale Ultramarine
Manganese Blue + Crimson Red	Burnt Umber	Ivory Black	Greek Terracotta
Titanium White	Zinc White + Lamp Black	Prussian Blue	Gold Ochre

Styles, singularities and rarities

Aside from the different color palettes, Catharsis represents different painting styles. Different ways of colouring the background canvas (from Plain Color, Top Row Pouring, Linear Paint Roller, Rhythmic Paint Roller to Stains), and also alternative ways to execute the painting itself (Broad Brushstrokes, Hole, High Density and Brush Majoris), defining different styles and singulatities.

Top Row Pouring	Linear Paint Roller	Rhythmic Paint Roller	Stains
Broad Brushstrokes	Hole	High Density	Brush Majoris

Evolutive algorithm

A particular feature of Catharsis is its evolutionary nature, the fact that the code evolves each time it is executed. Inspired by William Latham's ideas, I wanted to create an algorithm that, instead of being static, would mutate, change and transform throughout its "life". From the general idea of evolution, I wanted to conceptualise the Catharsis collection as a great progression of intensity, as if we were watching the frames that show the increasing energy on a cathartic episode. This way, the style of the outputs evolves from the beginning of the series to the final artworks. Starting with a less dense and timid mood, the algorithm evolves towards a more energetic behaviour, involving more paint on the pieces, and applying it with greater ferocity. However, this increase in intensity is not strictly linear, but with small ups and downs, making the evolution more organic and natural. New features and high density rarities appear as the series progresses, and new color palettes show up.
This evolution concept makes the whole linear collection into a big artwork itself, each piece representing one step in the incremental cathartic release of creativity. Instead of a static code that may produce the same kind of outputs throughout the entire series, with the same likehood of singularities, features, styles and color schemes, Catharsis represents the first time an algorithm mutates, changes, evolves on the block-chain while it is being executed.

Catharsis #4 - Four

Catharsis #508 - A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square

Catharsis #985 - Wham

Long-structure

One characteristic that I wanted Catharsis to have is that in each artwork the paint should have rhythm, movement, like music, rather than a simple random distribution that would lead to a chaotic result. This rhythm can be perceived by observing an output, in which we see that at the same time that I let the paint move freely, I design an underlying rhythm in which we can identify the movement of the "painter's" arm.
Today we are all familiar with the term "long-form", a concept that defines the way in which we generative artists work today, producing large collections of works that have the dual requirement of having a common style but sufficient variability between them. The "long-structure" represents a step beyond this idea. Instead of a large collection of outputs where each develop independently in their own visual space, I wanted to design a structure that embraces the whole project, making each work to be part of that massive structure.
The first step towards the "long-structure" was to ensure that the movement in each work spreads to the next. This made it possible to conceive the idea of the paint on one artwork to extend and invade the next one and, as the rhythm continues, from that artwork it spreads to the next and from there to the next... This made it possible to conceive Catharsis as an immense polyptych, in which each artwork found continuity with the previous one and this with the following one, resulting very interesting for the collecting of diptychs and triptychs, something not yet enough explored to date in generative art.
However, with collectors in mind, it would have been very difficult to construct a diptych for the artwork, for example, 273, if only continuity was found with 272 (on the left) and 274 (on the right). Moreover, to acquire a triptych would have been almost impossible. So I have re-designed the underlying rhythm to be a musical phrase that is repeated every 50 artworks. In this way, artwork number 273 finds continuity with 274, but also with 324, 374, 424, 474... and also with previous values such as 74, 124, 174.... This greatly increases the possibilities for the collectors and the interest of the project.

The fact that the artworks find continuity as long as pairs are picked within a distance of 50 works (or multiples of 50), allows the collectors to have a great variability of possibilities to build their own diptychs or triptychs, giving them their creative space in this project and greatly enhancing the collector's experience.

The whole collection has been conceived as a game board where eveybody is invited to create, a puzzle of massive dimensions which I hope will provide fun for everyone.

The "long-structure" concept defines precisely this, not just the work of programming a collection of massive dimensions with a great deal of variability between outputs, but the design of the entire collection around some kind of structure so that the outputs are not just images independent of each other, but form a conceptual and structured whole which I hope Catharsis collectors will enjoy.

Long-structure and continuity. Paint spilled across different canvases. Triptych comformed with Catharsis #703 - Penthouse Serenate (left), Catharsis #254 - Exactly Like You (center) and Catharsis #405 - This Time the Dream's on Me (right)

Collecting Catharsis

To explore and collect Catharsis, I recommend browsing what's available on the secondary market through OpenSea.