A
s someone who’s deeply in love with
the analog arts and the dying skill of
hand-sketching, I never thought I’d be
confessing that an emerging new cult
of digital illustration and architectural
renderings has me feeling giddy with excitement.
I don’t mean your average CGI visuals — which, while
serving an important purpose, usually pose as nothing
more than developer or real estate porn. What I’m
talking about is a new breed of digital artists who are
adopting a less conventional, more painterly approach,
evoking feelings of tactility and beautifully crafted
atmospheres in the abstract scenes they create.
Perhaps the real reason we see the rise of these
fantastic and surreal digital realities is our collective
desire for visual escape through a new kind ofRender moment
DESIGN
immersive imagery, coupled with an insatiable
appetite for what’s new and what’s next.
One such digital artist is Alexis
Christodoulou, who became frustrated with
the lack of modern aesthetics represented
in the digital world since playing video
games as a child. Based in Cape Town in
South Africa, Christodoulou turned to
YouTube tutorials while working as a
copywriter to learn the art of digital
visualisations. His images bridge the concept
of indoor and outdoor spaces, often featuring
tiled surfaces, shallow pools of water,
geometric shapes and generous proportions,
all tinted in pastel colours. Having generated
a cult following on Instagram,
Christodoulou’s clean, modern aesthetic
seems to have struck a universal chord.
Over in Sweden, creative director Anders
Brasch-Willumsen has been pursuing a
personal project known as A Lucid Dream
in Pink, Sleep Cycle No 1–7. True to its name,
Brasch-Willumsen’s evocative series captures
the idea of a lucid dream — a particular state
in which one is aware they’re dreaming and
can therefore control the narrative. His crisp
and emotive images somehow manage to
delicately bend the reality, manifesting as
utterly sublime fantasies.
Arguably one of the most established
artists in this area is Copenhagen- and
Malmö-based studio Wang & Söderström,
led by spatial and furniture designer
Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström.
The practice creates “mind tickling”
(their description) moving and still images
that maintain a high degree of lifelike
tactility — in their talented hands, an object
or an idea that’s ostensibly well-known and
recognisable from the real world can suddenly
appear warped. The pair’s ongoing Treasures series
amalgamates imaginary materials and ambiguous
shapes created onscreen that, through the use of
cunning analog perspectives, appear as highly
stylised still-life images.
Their House Without Rules short film is a
continuous vertical camera pan that travels through
four floors of a building immune to the usual rules
of gravity. Giant wobbly shapes varying in colours
and textures satisfyingly squish and bounce around
the rooms as tangible but hyperreal objects that
make me wish I could reach into my computer
screen and touch them.
What all of these fictitious spaces have in common
is an ability to cross multiple creative fields such as
conceptual thinking, art direction, illustration,
interior design and even architecture. Much like any
other form of analog art, today’s digital artists are
legitimising CGI as a new medium for creative
self-expression. Through imagination and
impeccable design sensibilities, they are rendering
a world even more beautiful than our reality. VL
@teaaalexis @studio_brasch @wangsoderstromABOVE Playground Pool
by South African digital
artist Alexis Christodoulou.Move over, hyperreality. A creative new breed of digital
artists has taken 3D rendering into an immersive world of
surrealism, fantasy and tactility. By Dana Tomic Hughes ́68 vogueliving.com.auIMAGE COURTESY ALEXIS CHRISTODOULOUVLife