Hemer is an exciting young artist who in the past year has exhibited in Seoul, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington. He has also created an installation for the Outer Spaces programme currently showing at the Christchurch Art Gallery.

His dynamic abstraction is attracting attention for its highly of the moment blending of digital media and meticulous hand painting. As part of the exhibition, he has also produced a fantastic complex new work of riotous colour for our billboard project space above the Gallery's courtyard - visible from Ghuznee Street and Glover Park. This work is available on commission as a painting at 1.5 x 3 metres. Andre has written of this new body of work:

"In the contemporary world of the transient digital, painting is a reminder of the pertinence of the physical. Painting was, is, and will always be here in 3-D. It's real. It's material and instinctive. It makes you want to touch it, and it holds a visual memory like no other."

These paintings are a juxtaposing landscape of Photoshop gradations, blurred digital images, vector scrawls, graffiti process, painterly intervention, and rudimentary 3-D renderings akin to an early computer game.

They are about the idea of what remains when an image has been worked on, erased, scaled, photographed, and painted again. It's the idea that painting can hold all these visual artefacts and turn them into something more - creating paintings that act as evidence to an alternative aesthetic reality. Unlike a jpeg file a painting can't be deleted so easily...the physical remnants stand tall and even the mark of deletion is retained as an act.

In this sense I'm interested in the cinematic potential of painting. A painting is always a snapshot of a moment in production - it's never so much finished as it is open enough to let a conversation begin. Through a simple static image we are left with the pieces of a long and interwoven timeframe.