About Julie Monaco's work

Landscape pictures, especially views of the sea that could not be anymore classical, with low-lying horizons, suggest an endless expanse. Sometimes the sea is leaden and motionless; sometimes the onlooker sees stormy and lashing waves, with brilliant cloud formation building up against the sky. The onlooker's viewpoint is in different places - sometimes very high, sometimes below, so that you can almost smell the water.

With her series of pictures like cs_0 Julie Monaco produced an artificial, abstract reality. The wild romanticism of nature was created in purely digital form by means of computation process. A number, a numeric code, is her starting point. Neither concrete models such as photographs or scans were used to produce the image; nor were the images generated from any real image. Software tools were used to produce the landscape pictures. For these several computer programs were used to define selection and parameters. Rendering was used to visualize the three-dimensional model that was created with this approach.  

Julie Monaco uses software that is based on fractal logic. The fractal, which is the smallest common denominator,  is what combines nature and computer software. Fractal are created by the repeated application of a geometrical principle, in computer technology by iteration (feedback) of a mathematical equation. Fractal mathematics is mainly used to generate pictures, and it is particularly suited to generate natural phenomena like clouds, mountains, trees and ocean surfaces.

Julie Monaco uses and control the potential offered by computer technology in an ideal fashion and immediately transposes it into works of art, in a logical and precise manner. In doing so, she conscientiously applies paradigmatic categories of art history (window motifs, canvas formats, using the colour sepia). With that she enters into a dialogue with a series of masterpieces such, for example, the sea views of Hiroshi Sugimoto. On the other hand, the wide-screen format reminds of cinema films, a still of a fictitious space.  

(copy based on article "_21" by Elisabeth Priedl and Ursula Grad, published "Julie Monaco _21" catalogue 2005.)