FORM FOLLOWS NATURE – solo exhibition by Erik Natzke

curated by Luca Barbeni
November 7th-14th – Galleria Allegretti Contemporanea, via San Francesco D’Assisi, 14
Opening november 7th, 7 p.m.

“New needs need new techniques. … It seems to me that the modern cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own techniques …” Jackson Pollock

Erik Natzke, artist, designer and programmer, creates and gives material substance to his ideas through immaterial computer code. His sensibility, combined with his stubborn resolve, has enabled him to push back the limits of his medium, beyond known methods and approaches.

Natzke’s work focuses on aesthetics and methodology, in which code and numbers generate beauty. When Natzke wants to draw something, he doesn’t pick up a pencil. He opens his Flash software editor and starts writing code.

Natzke uses programming to create his tools, colours and ultimately his artistic vocabulary. A vocabulary that is highly personal and unique. His artistic work can be seen as a sort of bridge between impressionism and expressionism.
He is an impressionist in his emphasis on colour instead of the subject, but an expressionist in his use of a “digital gesture,” injecting dynamism into form. He is an impressionist when he represents nature, an expressionist when his works take an abstract bent.
Working step by step, Natzke changes a line of code, adjusts a variable, and assigns different values to codes generating shape and colour.

Natzke, however, doesn’t just make do with existing tools for creating form. Instead he reaches directly into the source code, dipping his fingers into the digital inks, and like a contemporary alchemist creates all the colours he needs.
For Natzke, the creative process is not confined to the programming room, or to moments when he contemplates nature. Rather, it is a continuous lending and borrowing of shapes, patterns, colours, processes and dynamics between the material and immaterial worlds. Form follows nature.

Two special Share Festival events will be dedicated to the artist Erik Natzke.
Friday, 6th November at 11 AM at the Quazza Laboratory of the University of Turin, Natzke will be giving a keynote lecture on his artistic work and approach, constituting a new movement that he has spearheaded and which is attracting many followers.
Saturday, 7th November, opening of the exhibition dedicated to Natzke at the Allegretti Contemporanea Art Gallery in Via San Francesco d’Assisi 14, Turin, presenting a selection of the artist’s most recent works.