ILANA ZWESCHI | BEAUTY + VIOLENCE

Immediately recognizable, Ilana Zweschi’s abstract paintings derive from her use of handwritten algorithms to determine precise arrangements of brush strokes and complex color gradations. Influenced by her studies in math as well as art, she began as a figure painter before realizing that her interest in logic could be incorporated into painting. While the paintings begin with formal elements that collaborate with an algorithm, underlying figurative drawings give the algorithm something organic to build on.

Ilana Zweschi attended Skidmore College, graduating summa cum laude in 2011 with an Art Major and a Mathematics Minor. In 2014, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the State University of New York at Albany. Zweschi has exhibited expansively, recently completing a large-scale commission for the Facebook Open Arts Program. She is part of the Microsoft and SeaTac art collections, and received the DASH artist grant for 2022. Notable group shows include: Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York, Museum of Museums in Seattle, and Out of Sight: A Survey of Contemporary Art in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published in the No. 145 Pacific Coast Issue of New American Paintings,a Youngspace interview, and featured on the opening page of the Culture section of the Seattle Met in 2020.

My paintings involve math and philosophical reflection. Through hand-written algorithms, I can transform any text document into colorful oil paintings. I target destructive texts, words that are connected to harm in our current society. The raw data of the text acts as input for the algorithm, which is then run through a series of “if/then” rules I assign based on the structure and grammar of the written words to receive an output of painterly actions.

While the visual outcome of each painting is abstract, all works start with representational drawings beneath to give the algorithm something organic to react to. One small moment in the drawing can cause a ripple effect of painted marks echoing off and overlapping each other.

The show title Beauty + Violence has both visual and conceptual origins. Visually, many of the forms appear to be exploding with light and color or are walking the line between referencing a bouquet of flowers and a mushroom cloud. Conceptually, I am disarming the harm in the text by obscuring and recontextualizing it. My goal is to transform something harmful into something beautiful and point to the complicated relationship between love and power.

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