Statement 2

I make eye candy. End of story. 

Statement 1

By day, Eric C. Gutierrez haunts the streets of Washington DC as just another working stiff. By night, he labors in his subterranean lair beyond the city limits relentlessly abusing pixels and vertices to make digital art. He’s ostensibly schooled in traditional media and methods but is self-taught as a digital artist. His digital images reject evidence of the hand, have little or no emphasis on the figure or narrative but often tend towards figuration. He has also produced photographs, mixed media works, assemblages and collages.

As snapshots from his stream of consciousness, the work reflects the contradictions, ambiguities and dynamics of the milieu he finds himself adrift in. Private and highly subjective thought processes, mundane daily experiences and discrete moments shaped by inescapable forces and energies beyond conscious control are revealed through the interaction of forms confined to a shallow space. The process of composition is expressed by formalizing chance events with multiple meanings amid a generalized state of instability and then weaving fragmentary perceptions into somewhat coherent structures. Sometimes. Because as often as not, his images celebrate the energy and poetry in unchecked visual chaos.

When working digitally, he takes advantage of rendered reflections, refraction and transparency to subvert expectations, distort pictorial space and spatial relationships. He embraces the underlying digital structures and noise inherent in the process and exploits the expressive potential of failures and glitches. He makes no preliminary sketches or drawings, and works directly in a digital workflow utilizing 3D modeling, raster graphics and vector graphics software programs. A sense of continuity is maintained by using the key source file from the previous image as the starting point for the current image which in turn becomes the starting point for the next image. The result of this iterative process is that source files are deliberately overwritten from one image to the next so there’s no going back … no do-overs, only constant change and forward movement.