Michael Staniak

Having to navigate this virtual landscape poses many new challenges, like entering a strange yet captivating land without a map. For millennia, new technology has been developed to navigate the unknown chaos of nature; charts, microscopes, night-vision and satellites, all aid us in traversing our physical environment. Staniak and his human brain longs to decipher and ascribe meaning to cryptic, often meaningless, visual data – all with the purpose of taking the sting from our environment, affording ourselves the best chance of adaptation.

In a new series of HDF paintings, Staniak’s signature casting-compound textures and saturated, screen-like hues are treated with an extra visual device. Software-based geometric compositions dissect his seemingly random and improvised gestures into more ordered areas of information.

As we voyage deeper into an age of dual environments – the physical and the virtual – Staniak’s textured paintings highlight the phenomena of both realms. The illusory effect ensures a variety of visual interpretations: the viewer’s position, either on or offline, affects the subsequent experience. When the paintings are viewed on the screen, the texture is emphasised; when viewed physically they seem flat, like a digital print or a backlit screen. His paintings are reminiscent of the topographies of other planets viewed by satellite imaging, or surfaces viewed under a microscope. 

The rapid evolution of our online habitat has challenged us to be ever more reliant on digital media for guidance. Staniak’s new paintings fuse elements of traditional and new technologies to reinterpret his textural information. His shapes and lines, formed using screen-based software and applied to the surfaces through UV flatbed printing, act like markers or borders amongst a seemingly random landscape.