dele Warner is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land in the Eora Nation.

Adele Warner’s overlays a post-internet condition onto the painterly canon. Works speak to malaise within the everyday, the result of a collapse of truth and shifting meta-narratives. Navigating the boundary between the surreal, uncanny and documentary, paintings desire to embody intuitive feelings of unease and alienation, functioning as a mediation between the self and reality.

Through oil paints, Warner returns to a process of slowing down; of resisting a post-internet condition, embodied in an overwhelming availability and “grind” culture. Compositions are synthesised from both user-generated content forums (such as Reddit and Wikimedia Commons) and personal photography. This material, divorced from the context of its creator (an unintended consequence of these host platforms structures), becomes alien; an artefact evocative of our digital zeitgeist. Paintings function as inquiries of social conditions in which everyday rituals and objects are recast as estranged mirrors of modernity.

Visual distortion from compression is mimicked physically to speak to the loss of nuance within the contextless void of the web. Representations of the female nude reoccur, musing on authoring one’s own body. Built up from grisaille underpaintings, layers emerge from the canvas illuminating irregularities of a fragmented world.