Deiana’s most recent body of work explores the translation of form between digital and analog worlds. The pieces are highly detailed, labor-intensive drawings and altered found-object sculptures that create a conceptual illusion of three-dimensional renderings that stem from my geometric two-dimensional work. His recent work in graphite translates the digital gesture into analog form. Beginning by an exploration of brushstrokes in Photoshop where he makes marks in the digital
domain and then magnifies the forms to find the pixelated rough spots and aesthetic imperfections. Once he identifies the miscalculated strokes, he explores the negative space of the subject matter and then works to create the energy of the form onto paper with graphite.
In his smaller drawings, he employs more convoluted framing devices to reflect a different aspect of digital media’s malleability: the tendency of arbitrary shapes to endlessly replicate themselves within relatively narrow parameters. In these, he inscribes an abstract texture that can be described as resembling fabric viewed through TV static. This is framed within an outline built of right angles alternating with semicircular cut outs and overlaid with tightly spaced, thin-ruled pencil markings. The result is a fundamental tension between the geometric and painterly, the planar and the abstract, soft and hard, noise and information, space and flatness. The transcribed shapes are an evolution of his designs. Every shape is different and sometimes call to mind references to architecture, as many of his drawings also function as maquette for potential sculptures. Deiana’s can envision them as huge metal cutouts. The influence from architecture is a central tenet of his work, stemming from Deiana’s childhood in Italy where I was surrounded by the tension between the historic and the progressive change that architecture renders upon the visual landscape. Pathos and absurdity accompany the herculean and obsessive lengths to which he will go to replicate a small bit of digital distortion, yet this gesture is firmly grounded in the history of drawing from a model. These recent drawings offer the viewer a commentary on the way in which our increasing dependence on the computer and its simulacra has eclipsed the primacy of human relationships.