Abstract Painting Online Buzz
Several online gallery posts are highlighting abstract practice and critique: Upstream Gallery’s CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance show features Jonas Lund’s ‘Abstract Feed,’ which satirises social‑media scrolling, and Armenian artist Hayk Miqayelyan’s layered pigment work is getting attention for vibrant texture. (x.com) (x.com). Meanwhile, process‑oriented posts — from chrysotype color studies to language‑based abstract experiments spotlighted by Tezos Commons — suggest painters and photo‑process artists are cross‑pollinating how color and method are discussed online. (x.com) (x.com)
A cluster of recent online gallery posts has been drawing attention to two strands of contemporary abstraction: work that uses abstract imagery to comment on how we scroll, and work that insists on paint’s physicality. (upstreamgallery.nl) At Upstream Gallery’s group show CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance, Jonas Lund presents Abstract Feed, a video installation that looks and behaves like a social‑media scroll but never shows recognizable faces, products, or headlines. (embed-rech-01.dialog.cm) Abstract Feed keeps the vertical, swipe‑to‑next rhythm of TikTok and Instagram Reels while filling each frame with algorithmically produced color fields and shapes, so the viewer experiences the endless, hypnotic motion of a feed without the usual clickbait content. (embed-rech-01.dialog.cm) The point is concrete: the interface — the motion and timing, the device aspect ratio — is the message. (jonaslund.com) By stripping out semantic anchors (people, logos, captions), Lund makes the scroll itself visible; you feel the machine that keeps attention, not what that machine usually shows. (annkakultys.com) Alongside that conceptual critique, posts have flagged paintings whose interest is exactly the opposite: dense, tactile surfaces that resist digital flattening. (artsy.net) Armenian painter Hayk Miqayelyan’s canvases show thickly applied pigment and palette‑knife work that you can almost feel through a screen. (artsy.net) The paint sits in layers — ridges of color, scraped edges, scumbled passages — so a photograph of the painting suggests a rough topography as much as a picture. (artfinder.com) Those two poles — interface critique and material insistence — are appearing together online because social media has become a primary place for artists and small galleries to compare methods and to argue about what matters in art now. (upstreamgallery.nl) Complementing the conversation about paint are posts focused on process. Chrysotype color studies, for example, have been circulating among photo‑process communities; the chrysotype is an old printing method that uses gold salts to render images and can yield unusual purples, reds and browns depending on chemistry and humidity. (en.wikipedia.org) Artists experimenting with chrysotypes often publish side‑by‑side test strips — small squares that show how a change in paper or exposure alters a hue — and those strips make color itself a topic of discussion rather than just a property of an image. (mountain-intaglio.com) Meanwhile, blockchain and generative‑art hubs are highlighting language‑driven abstraction: text prompts, programs, and small on‑chain scripts that translate words into shape, color, or motion and mint the outputs as editions. (spotlight.tezos.com) Platforms built on Tezos and related communities have been curating and tweeting simple experiments that show how a phrase can steer an algorithm toward different families of abstract forms. (spotlight.tezos.com) Seen together, these posts show a change in how artists and audiences talk about abstraction: sometimes it’s used to point at the architecture of attention, sometimes to insist on the stubbornness of material, and sometimes to test how language and code can make new kinds of nonrepresentational images. (jonaslund.com) CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance opens alongside Upstream’s Marinus Boezem presentation and runs in Amsterdam through April 18, 2026. (upstreamgallery.nl)
