Bart Stolle is developing a complex body of work that consists mainly of paintings, drawings and animated films. He accommodates his works under the name ‘Low Fixed Media Show’, which functions both as an advertising agency for his practice and as an alternative entertainment company. His works reveal a strong interest in computer language, science, space travel and artificial intelligence. And yet he does not use the latest technologies or media to create his works, preferring instead manual, more labour-intensive techniques. He carefully constructs his paintings according to certain rules that he imposes on himself: a black surface, for example, can never be painted directly on a blue background. Every action is like a precise move in a game of chess. 

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Certain colours recur frequently in his work, such as cobalt blue and cadmium orange. These were the first two colours to be produced on an industrial scale in the textile industry, and which can still be recognized today in the typical overalls. Stolle resolutely chooses an early modernist formal idiom to say as much as possible with as few resources as possible. Like the Suprematists, he hopes to suggest the invisible through elementary forms. Figures become stacks of squares and spheres, or a city becomes a busy map of geometric units. Stolle explores similarities between computer logic and the human mind. He firmly believes that the computer will never take over the role of the artist. An algorithm cannot replace human creativity.

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In recent years, Bart Stolle has increasingly devoted himself to his drawing practice. On a daily basis, he develops works on paper in a purified formal idiom: repetitions and variations with dots, dashes and lines. In doing so, Stolle often refers to natural processes and evolutions as well as to self-organizing patterns and statistics. The drawings are executed so meticulously that they almost seem to have been printed mechanically. In both his paintings and drawings, the artist seeks out the tension between the digitally generated ‘appearance’ and the underlying manual labour.