By replacing canvas and palette with 3-D printing and VR headsets, the British artist is taking the viewer into another dimension.
In celebration of its 250th birthday, London's Royal Academy Of Arts explores the historic practice of life drawing in a revolutionary way. Beginning with the Academy's 18th-century origins, 'From Life' continues to the present and, most intriguingly, moves into the future. Historical paintings hang alongside works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Jenny Saville, Michael Landy, Chantal Joffe, Gillian Wearing, Antony Gormley and Jonathan Yeo. But for the first time, the RA is supporting several of these artists in their use of emerging technologies. Ongoing developments in virtual reality and 3-D printing present artists with new ways to observe and represent themselves and their subjects, and Jonathan Yeo is at the vanguard of this brave new art world.
Yeo has always drawn from life and is best known as the man who responded to a White House commission to paint President George W Bush with a trompe l'oeilportrait made from torn-up Seventies porn magazines. Series of porn collages followed, which used the flesh tones of the photographs instead of paint, before "the material ran out since iPads killed the industry". Yeo went on to paint bodies undergoing plastic surgery, because "Cosmetic surgery tells you so much about people, their sense of identity, their insecurities... and society's ideals of beauty."
Recently, Yeo began to explore the possibilities of technology out of "idle curiosity", visiting Google, Facebook, Apple and various independent tech companies in the US, where he saw "all kinds of things that blew me away". Google suggested his Central London studio become the UK testing ground for its new art software, Tilt Brush. Once it was installed, Wearing and Gormley came to play. "Tilt Brush gives you this incredible freedom to draw what you want. You don't have to plan before you start, you put your headset on, pick up your tools and make marks, change them, delete them, it's like oil -painting. Gormley said, 'This is great but I want to see what I've made, I want it to be real.' We thought how amazing it would be to 3-D print our VR drawings, to freeze those marks and create a completely new medium for making things."
The software didn't exist, so Yeo went to see Pangolin, the foundry used by artists including Damien Hirst, who agreed to see what they could do. Meanwhile, the artist-led tech company Otoy, which specialises in rendering for special effects, offered to scan one of Yeo's subjects so that he could paint it in VR. "I decided to make it my head, so I could walk around myself, which is something self-portraitists have never been able to do. I could see myself from every angle and paint my head from life." These VR works are now sculptures, 3-D printed at Pangolin, and include the first physical free-standing sculpture in metal made using Tilt Brush. From Life reveals the processes behind Yeo and his fellow artists' tech-inspired works, while Sky Arts has commissioned a documentary about them, Virtual Reality: Mystery Of Creativity. An art-historical moment, this one. From Life is at The Royal Academy Of Arts, London, 11 December - 11 March 2018. royalacademy.org
