Chris Ashley - Look, See.

Every day since 2002 Chris Ashley has created an abstract coloured drawing in hand-coded HTML tables and posted it to his weblog “Look, See”. The structured format of a weblog frames these small but often complex works perfectly.

Weblogs are an informal medium and personal weblogs often have the quality of a diary or consisting of a confessional nature. This is a deflating context for art, one that in Chris's case allows some of the aesthetic content of high and late modernism to be rehabilitated without bathos. What was once meant to be universal is made personal, not with the knowingness of Neo Geo but with a remixer's virtuosity and enthusiasm.

Weblogs are also a highly referential medium, some weblogs consist almost entirely of commentaries on news or links to other blogs. The visually referential nature of Chris's HTML drawings shares this quality. Despite being grid-based geometric abstracts they evoke the heroic universal grids of high modernism, 8-bit computer graphics, or to the colours and forms of scenes of nature or technology. This is quite apart from their titles, which often refer to concrete entities. Again the informality of the weblog's context prevents the problem of how something concrete can be expressed or represented in abstraction from becoming a problem.

These are very successful works, and paradoxically it is the limitations of their chosen medium that helps make them so. Grids, especially HTML table grids, are a restrictive format. But this formal limitation can serve to free other qualities such as colour and composition. And formal constraints have often been used as a spur to creativity, by Dada or the Oulipo for example.

Looking at the watercolour works that Chris has also posted is instructive. Like the HTML table drawings they are formal but playful exercises in colour and composition. There is a strong hint of Sol LeWitt's geometric abstracts to some of the forms, and like LeWitt Chris's work can be seen as an ironic continuation of high modernism after its death in the 1960s. Where LeWitt's ironisation was in the form, with the platonism of pure abstraction recast as rigid geometric specifications, Chris's is in the subject, with visual referentiality replacing that hermetic platonism.

Recently, Chris has added another classic web design staple to his HTML, single-pixel animated GIFs. The result is not limited animation but very succesful moving images. Duration and movement of colour become formal properties alongside hue, saturation and transparency. Falling strips of colour evoke rain, flashing panels of contrasting brightness become lightning or city lights. This is more distillation than abstraction, it is peak shift evocation of visual experience.

It is the way that Chris's HTML table drawings hold and animate their aesthetic references that give them the internal complexity required to have a critical voice. Like a political weblog they draw in, interrogate and comment on issues from a larger world, although the world of aesthetics rather than politics. And it is this that gives them their lasting value as art.

Look, See - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/
Earlier HTML Drawings - http://chrisashley.net/htmldrawings/
Watercolours - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/cat_on_paper.html
Moving Images - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/2006_03.html