Mr. Florian Maier-Aichen exercises a tremendous artistic statement with Untitled (Lasso Painting #8) at Blum and Poe. Confronting the contemporary anxieties of sophisticated artificial intelligence permeating every digital second of 21^st century life, Mr. Maier-Aichen provides a boldly humanist affirmation by proving the limitations of technology. In a somewhat mischievous fashion, Mr. Maier-Aichen takes Photoshop – what he describes as the “new palette” – and brutishly demonstrates through human craftsmanship an inventiveness which is beyond the possible learnings of any machine.

Indeed, this testimony in celebrating mankind’s exaltation over computer machinations is also testimony to the rarity of artistry in widening the bandwidth of human possibility. Any trepidations in popular culture of humanity losing control of their destiny to automation, of being subjugated to the chaotic whimsy of malevolent machinery, is mollified by the superfluous evidence of man’s ownership of the very intimate domain in which computations are processed. And it is this florid and superfluous expression in the digital space which inundates and masterfully voids the preconceptions of a dystopian future ruled by robots, liberating the mind to think freer than being sunk by the anvils of anxiety.

This is not an installment of abstract expressionism per se. It is a Renaissance humanistic statement from beginning to end, including the purposeful inkjet printing of the photoshop torrid-handed choreography. Mr. Maier-Aichen reassures us, even in the fullest material realization of his virtual canvas through the pointillism homage in his printing, of man’s intricate control of the nature of his creations. Indeed, his work is a visual complement to the famed 20^thcentury mathematical discoveries of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems of arithmetic: countable devices are forever impaired from exceeding the transcendental potential of the human condition.