Harmony >< Tension begins with a fundamental question: what happens to painting once it enters a world built on screens? A painting is made of weight and surface. It holds presence in a room, demands a body in front of it. But the moment it’s photographed and passed through feeds, it mutates, flattened into pixels, consumed in seconds, dislocated from its scale. The “original” seems to become less critical than its digital shadow.

These ideas are at the center of ThankyouX’s practice, and this project works in that fault line. A palpable tension is always present between opposing forces: order and chaos, peace and disorder, the physical and the virtual. ThankyouX’s paintings are made knowing they’ll live a second life as digital images. For the center image of the project, screens are embedded into canvases, not as decoration but as a reminder that painting no longer stops at its own edges.

Where paint runs out, pixels pick up. The question isn’t which is more “authentic,” though the artist acknowledges that this question drives his practice, but why the split exists at all, and what kind of hybrid form emerges in the overlap. The paintings and digital animations in this collection explore this tension, not to resolve it, but to expose a problem: painting and digital media are now bound to each other, neither able to slowly stand alone, pushing how far one medium can carry the other before either breaks or new forms emerge.