Traversing the Threshold presents robotic paintings by the artist Liat Grayver and video works made by and in collaboration with Marcus Nebe, who has been following Grayver’s collaboration with the e-David painting robot over the last two years. The works presented here stretch into and expose the temporal and physical space of the artist’s creative process through the mediums of painting and video.

What could have been executed as one painting constructed of thousands of brushstrokes has instead been decomposed and distributed over numerous sheets of rice paper. Grayver cropped different sections of the master particle generatorimage and translated the individual particles into single brushstrokes (assigning parameters such as, for example, the size, length, pressure and speed variation of the strokes), before sending it to the robot for the final execution.

The individual paper works are extracted from a complex of computer-generated particles (Simulation of a World Overview) according to Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Scaled to different sizes, each can be viewed not only as an individual work but also as part of the modular wall installation. Nebe’s video compositions utilize close-up footage he made of the ink and paper interacting as Grayver created the works, offering intriguing temporal perspectives on the material’s response and impact on the act of painting.

The fragility of the ink-infused rice paper work in particular stands in sharp contrast to the industrial robot used to create them. As with Japanese calligraphy (the reference is obvious and undeniable), the brush trajectories and the ink’s behaviour as it penetrates the surface are here of several magnitudes more importance than the perception of the object itself.