Artistic wrap: Bubble wrap paintings by Bradley Hart.

Images: Bradley Hart.

The notion that the images we see have resolution is now accepted as a proven concept. But when artists began to explore this idea, perhaps beginning with artists like Frans Hals, leading to the Impressionists and then the Pointillists, resolution was not understood in the way it is today. As computers began to pixelate images, in other words define a resolution for a given size of image, the idea was laid bare and precise thresholds of resolution were demonstrated beyond which point the human eye was deceived, and the pixels lost.

The New York artist Bradley Hart is exploring this idea from a slightly different perspective by injecting paint into bubble wrap, a material with a predefined resolution. It is a fascinating technique but even more interesting works have emerged from the process by accident.

In a complicated process no doubt involving Photoshop, different colours of paint are injected in to bubble wrap. Each bubble of course representing a single pixel. Over time, an image emerges of something or somebody recognizable.

But in the process paint leaks out of the bubbles and by capturing this on paper behind, a second image is created that the artist calls the “Impressions” series. The Impressions actually look more resolved than the bubble paintings and in some way, using a mechanically defined process, take us back to the threshold of the discovery in the paintings of the Impressionists.

Gratitude to Design Taxi.