Scott Laufer: The Copyist

Barbati Gallery presents The Copyist, a new series of paintings by Scott Laufer, whose conception was informed by the space itself: a grand palazzo in the heart of Venice, Italy. This new body of work is not only in dialogue with the artist’s previous work in its use of contemporary technologies to engage with the semiotics of the art historical canon, but it also revisits a discourse proposed by Sigmar Polke in his Rasterbilder paintings.

While Polke worked with the tools of mass image distribution of the 1960s, specifically halftone printing, and explored the replacement of Enlightenment values such as family and church by media and capitalism, Laufer extends these ideas with newer technologies and symbols made commercially accessible by ubiquitous software such as Adobe and Microsoft. These image- and text-generating technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have replaced the markers of religion and royal lineage that have dominated Western society since the Byzantine era with their blend modes, clone stamps, wingdings and clip art. The use of these tools constitutes a formal strategy that Laufer employs to create a compositional and conceptual distance between the new paintings and their canonical references.