Natan's profile
Natan Lawson generates paintings that each appear like a hybrid between an intricately woven tapestry and a futuristic computer-generated image. His works are at once nostalgic and ultramodern, tactile and digital. They offer up familiar imagery in a frayed high-tech world.
Lawson collects and contemplates life’s remnants—culling motifs from his personal archive of needlepoint designs, alphabet charts, disposable plates, cursive homework sheets, and other domestic paper ephemera. The artist uses a custom-built Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine to translate these found visuals onto canvas. Holding a brush, a robotic arm paints one acrylic mark at a time according to thousands of lines of code. This grid-based meditative method recalls craft techniques like needlepoint, cross-stitch, and weaving. Monitoring and guiding the equipment, Lawson embraces rather than corrects the natural imperfections that paradoxically arise in automatic modes of production. He is part of a generation of contemporary artists who are investigating the fertile ground between the hand-made and the mechanical—ruminating in turn on other dichotomies between tradition and rebellion, order and chaos, death and rebirth.
