Angelo Plessas: Mirage Machines

Angelo Plessas‘ exhibition Mirage Machines, consists exclusively of the artist’s websites.

His works strongly reflect and master the language of the internet since the late 90s. Using the internet as a vehicle for exploration of subjectivity, iconography, abstraction and as a powered tool for experience, he creates mechanical landscape generators, where his online environments are visionary propositions that have been begotten in browser windows. Plessas is part of a generation of artists that grew up with Google and maintain a studio in their laptop, so pasting traditional media such as drawing onto a website is a natural act.

By turning the title of the work into a registered web-domain, he makes animated drawings that are at once electronic and unique, the image reproducible on millions of computers but existing only on its particular location of the singular internet address. Often focusing on the themes of authority and identity, Plessas’ web drawings become characters and portraits, alternating between funny and poignant, they reflect the abstract emotions often experienced in electronic communication and everyday misunderstandings. Works such as “MeLookingAtYou.com” (2005) are indeed portraits that owe as much to text emoticons as to Paul Klee’s naïve and complex emotional spirituality.