At Art Brussels, April 18 - 21, Honor Fraser Gallery will exhibit three C-prints and one digital video by artist Jeremy Blake (1971 - 2007). Produced in 1999 and 2000, these lush, otherworldly prints and animations were described by the artist and others as "digital paintings."

In fact, Blake trained as a painter, and he was able to translate his understanding of medium and material to his digital works at a time when the artistic implications of new technologies such as Photoshop and the flatscreen display were still poorly understood.

The works to be shown at Art Brussels - the animated DVD loop Angel Dust (2000) and the C-prints Guccinam, Liquid Villa and Incense Burner (all 1999) - are all drawn from a body of work once described by Blake as mixing "architectural and abstract imagery" in a kind of "painterly hallucination...represent[ing] the uncanny." In each of the works, architectural imagery appears as a series of high-gloss interiors, fantastical candy-colored pleasure palaces. These structures are rendered with an oneiric intensity; they are both hypnotic and alluring, yet in the absence of people they are also vaguely threatening. As Tim Griffin has written, the architectural spaces depicted in Blake's work almost seem to have a life of their own: "Rooms end up reading like crime scenes, the stuff of L.A. noir; they seem almost hung over or drugged, trying to remember what happened the night before."

This description could be applied to the scenes depicted in Blake's three C-prints. Smoke infuses a room in Incense Burner; in Guccinam, three candy-colored lozenge shapes adorn a wall papered with camouflage patterns that form eyelike swirls. At the bottom of the image, a brilliant orange and yellow streak suggests a spreading fire. Liquid Villa depicts a view through a window to an Alhambra-like courtyard with a glassy reflecting pool. Across the courtyard, orange lights are visible through horseshoe arches, hinting at clandestine goings-on in the darkened wing.

Within each of these interiors, certain details are sharply rendered: hard-edged lines and fields of color that have no texture but appear as slick gloss, with little surface grain visible to the naked eye. Yet in each, there are other areas where Blake has introduced what appears to be digital "noise." In Liquid Villa, this can be seen in the blocky, pixelated shading of the surface in the foreground, and in the jagged edges of the glowing orange torches, as if a low-resolution digital image had been printed at a blow-up scale. Beyond their aesthetic qualities, though, these passages also act as glitches in the otherwise impeccable fidelity of Blake's images. They function in a way that is analogous to a painting's facture: as traces that point back to the process by which the work was created, asserting the artwork's status as an opaque object rather than a transparent window on to a pictorial space.

Similarly, Angel Dust - a time-based work - moves fluidly between abstraction and representation. This work begins with a shimmering, luminous grid; carefully delineated rectangles of color pulse, shifting from desert tones to pasture greens to aqueous blues. At first, this seems like a pure play of form and color, but soon architectural elements appear onscreen, and the grid suddenly resolves into a bank of colorfully lit, modernist windows. Eventually, the colored rectangles slide away to reveal a field of falling snow (or angel dust?).

The interplay between flatness and pictorial depth functions very differently in Angel Dust than it might in an abstract painting by, say, Theo Van Doesburg or Paul Klee. Although Blake often connected his video work with his training as a painter, these images are paintings only in a metaphorical sense. Blake employed readily available software tools such as Photoshop, which (among any other functions) translate the movements of the artist's hand on an input device into colored pixels. These pixels are, in one sense, computer code - pure numerical abstractions - but in order for humans to see them, they must be translated into light. In the case of the C-prints, the pixels would shine onto photosensitive paper. For Angel Dust, Blake would display the work using light-emitting plasma (if on a large flatscreen) or on light-modulating liquid crystals (if on an LCD projector). In either case, the work could not exist without digital code and more tangible materials.

This interplay between digital code and tangible material is thematized in Angel Dust. If the pulsating, colored grid evokes the pixels that constitute the digital image, the scattered motes of "angel dust" suggest the formations of silver halide crystals that make up analog cinema and photography. This is not to suggest that these modes - the analog and the digital - are set in opposition in Blake's work. Rather, they co-exist; digital code cannot be perceived by the human sensorium without the intermediation of oozing liquids and scattered crystals.

In a conversation with John Baldessari in 2004, Blake described an early source of inspiration for his move to screen-based media.

"In Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, you see Julie Christie in her apartment at the mercy of a, well, basically a flat screen, with kaleidoscopic, hypnotic projections being piped in from an all-powerful regime that has burned books and provided instead a kind of insidious abstract entertainment. When I was a student I saw that and thought, What a great comment on abstraction. What a weird, uncanny, dystopic potential for abstraction. I wanted to make paintings like that."

In Truffaut's film, geometric abstraction and other modernist styles are held up as failures: reduced to mere ornamentation, and offered to the masses as a sense-tingling but mind-numbing panacea. But the decorative, sensory, psychedelic weave of images that physically affect the sensorium of the body were never really outside of the project of modernism; they were merely its flip side. Haunted by the perceived failure of geometric abstraction, Blake found within it not dystopia, but a "dystopic potential."

Text by Michael Connor. In 2014 Connor will curate an exhibition for Honor Fraser Gallery that reconsiders Blake's digital paintings alongside recent works by contemporary artists.