You Actually Need a Smartphone to View These Paintings Properly

To comment on society's technology-induced distance from art, J. Robert Feld made a series of paintings that requires the aid of a smartphone camera.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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These days, it's hard not to get so caught up in an art show that you forget to put down the iPhone, especially when everyone else around you is firing away. While the occasional art selfie may score you a ton of likes on Instagram, you also risk missing the entire meaning behind a work of art during your photo-snapping sessions.

"People rush through a museum, like a scavenger hunt, capturing images in their devices, as if that’s an appropriate substitute for pausing and contemplating the work," J. Robert Feld so articulately told Fast Co.Design. To depict the world's apparent attachment to technology and society's disconnection with art, the Brooklyn-based artist decided to create a series of paintings that actually require the use of a smartphone to be viewed properly.

For his Mondrian Inverted: The Viewer Is Not Present series, Feld has replicated Piet Mondrian's iconic geometric compositions. The only difference is that Feld has inverted the color palette of Mondrian's paintings. Thus, reds appear teal, blues become light yellow, and so forth. Only through the inverted color function of a smartphone will viewers be able to see the paintings as Mondrian had originally painted them.

“The paintings themselves aren't the work: The act of looking through the phone and seeing the painting appear more real and recognizable on the screen than on the wall in front of you is the concept of the series," Feld said. 

[via FastCo.Design]

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