From the virtual to the material: Digital art without screens in the works of Tamara Moura Costa and Federico Kehm

Revealing Thickness is a digital art exhibition, but without screens, augmented reality, or unleashed AI. On the ground floor of the Miranda Bosch gallery, Tamara Moura Costa and Federico Kehm charted an unexpected path from virtuality to materiality. The result is striking due to a series of characteristics ranging from mathematical precision to the use of unconventional resources, tools, and materials. The exhibition, curated by Julieta Agriano, is somewhat of an "inverse path" to what is expected of a digital art exhibition.

At the gallery entrance, Kehm, a visual artist who has been experimenting with intersections between "idea, form, and time," presents his digitally conceived and originated works, now expressed in volumes and drawings in various formats and media. Previously, he had explored programming, generative art, design, and animation: all of which converge in a visual quest, in the aesthetic resolution of many questions. "I began making digital works that remained on the screen, works of slow temporality, that had to do with growth, with the organic. However, I found a common pattern there that had to do with a certain sensorial or material issue that came from my past." From then on, he began the journey of bringing those graphic resolutions from the screen to paper, printing on different surfaces to which he added subsequent interventions.

One of the most striking works in his collection is "Regulated and Absent," a transparent block containing various drawings, in three layers of acrylic and cotton paper, intervened with pencil, graphite, oil pastel, and so on. It's the one Kehm chose to express how he does it and what his exhibition is about: "This work has to do with temporal thickness, which is the idea of ​​the superimposed code, working with the temporality of what it gives me, for example, a work on screen. I'm interested in progression, the challenge of being able to translate it into a physical work. I worked with temporality, but in depth."

“It has layers, of course, everything I do has layers,” concludes Kehm, an artist who also experiments with animation, video, and drawing, where the generative intertwines with the material. His biography emphasizes that his work combines the organic and the systematic, the visible and the hidden, in dialogue with other disciplines such as music and industrial design. “The layers give you a sense of thickness, of palimpsest, as if you could spy on the center of the form where there are a host of hidden meanings.”

Julieta Agriano thought of bringing these artists together and materializing a concept for a work. There's no improvisation; in her worldview, this exhibition has its roots in 2019 when she createdWIP Arte Digital , the platform that highlights the digital art scene, which is now a global benchmark , especially in Latin America. It was there that she met these artists.

When the gallery invited her to put together this exhibition, Agriano asked herself this question: "What proposal could be related to this type of space to also connect the digital art scene with that of contemporary art, which don't always interact? It's quite difficult for them to intersect. I thought about artists who were working digitally, but seeking to expand the notion of digital materiality into other territories." That's where she went.

The second room is dimly lit. It contains Tamara Moura Costa's intriguing pieces, a constellation of conceptually connected works: they are the materialization of previously conceived projects in a virtual universe, which become thicknesses of millimetrically precise metallurgy. For this reason, Moura Costa works from the idea of ​​code, of numbers. She studied Electronic Arts at Untref , where she learned how to use Processing , a software that allows her to create images from generated code, as well as prototypes and highly defined patterns. "This enables a calculation, a mathematics that determines the color of each pixel, the point of each line, the precision."

Moura Costa is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with Brazilian roots. Her work integrates "the sensorial, the technical, and the conceptual." She has exhibited in Belgium, France, Italy, Colombia, and Spain. It could be said that what she's showing emerges from a body of work she began in 2023. "I was creating a narrative about how this seed emerges, which then transforms into something a little more figurative and evolves from 2D, from the most primitive—white, black, dot, line—to something more 3D."

When she was invited to this exhibition, she decided to make her works concrete. In fact, she was already working with laser engraving on acrylic, which generated pieces through a mechanical process, but with the precision of a goldsmith. “The laser is the most precise thing in the physical world. I began experimenting with acrylics and engraving, and then I wanted to give it a body, a volume, and I began to experiment with resin. These bodies began to emerge, these series, also conceived as distances, or iterations of this narrative that evolves until it loses its form. It moves toward something more concrete, more material, more about being able to observe how the interior of the resin reacts to impacts.” The artist describes the process of one of her works with “laser engraving on acrylic or laser-engraved acrylic.” First, she composed the volume of the resin, it solidified; then she placed the already laser-engraved acrylics on the resin, painted it, and to give it a fine polish, she took the piece to a mechanical workshop where they provided her with a polishing machine to give it the final touch.

Moura Costa was experimenting with resin, and Kehm was already making works based on code, but captured and modified in acrylics, layers of film, or paper. Agriano concludes: “Something I like to do in curating is bring technology closer to people and present it in a less encrypted way, because when you talk about a digital art exhibition, the public sometimes imagines they're going to see nothing but screens. I also thought about material devices that occupy a space to generate a connection, rather than a distance, between the public and digital art and its different forms of expression.”

In the presentation of Kehm's series, there is a question that is as disturbing as it is illuminating of his work and this entire exhibition: "What happens if I open a shape to see what's inside?"