John Bauer (B. 1971)

An ominous mass of smudged monochrome printed on linen, John Bauer’s Facial uses a combination of digital methodology and more traditional design technique in order to create an uneasy sense of modernity, somewhere between the real and the virtual. Sharply cropped fragments of pattern and jagged digital ‘mousestrokes’ bespeak the work’s origins in Bauer’s library of Photoshop designs, but Bauer augments his digital material in by screen-printing layers of designs over one another before stencilling and spraypainting them. Bauer’s work gives powerful voice to the claustrophobia and confusion generated in the often bewildering intersection of technology and reality, as ever more layers of visual information thicken over one another. What’s more, produced alongside the similar works My Dreams Were Lit Like Pornography and in Them I Fucked Girls Made of Cardboard and A Six-Foot-by-Four Foot Painting of a Naked Lady, the piece has the distinct air of unsettling sexuality: the queasy blur of forms seems haunted by the alienating distance between the human body and technology’s representations of its desires.