Thursday, Mar 02, 2017 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

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Dutch artist Paul Kooiker’s new book entitled Tokyo has its origins in just one photography session held by Kooiker in Tokyo in 2015. Kooiker shot approximately a dozen color photographs of a model posing in a pin-up pose, pushing a set of Venetian blinds to the right, that is casting a striped shadow onto her body.

In the spring of 2016, the series was first shown under the title History X. Kooiker had revised a few of the nearly identical images in Photoshop, freely altering layer after layer, often stretching the image beyond recognition while exploiting Photoshop's complete color spectrum. The large inkjet prints he made from his experiments conveyed a subtle painterly effect.

Expanding his series, Kooiker downsized the image to a square format, shifting the focus to the model's bottom, while he kept laboring on and experimenting with this basic image in Photoshop. The book presents the widest array of possible variations on a theme.

The resulting images might resemble the art of painting, but in the end it amounts to neither painting nor photography. Kooiker has travelled the dual track of image abstraction and obsessive repetition of a single digital cliché, thereby permitting himself ultimate freedom ; devoid of any narrative editing, walking the line between art catalogue and artist's book.