Artworks that Look Virtual, but Are Completely Hand Painted

These paintings by Johnny Abrahams look almost computer made - except they are not. Working mainly with black and white acrylic paints and with a lot of patience, the American artist is able to create dizzying, hyper digital-like canvases by hand. Compared to the many examples of digital art that we see emerging these days, it's hard to believe that these extremely organised paintings did not roll out of a computer.

Abrahams, often described as an op-artist, explains his works as explorations about perception with the viewer being the subject, while movement is emphasized. The starting point is quite mathematically a line, to which he adds various visual elements that create illusions of movements, planes and spaces.

But still, it looks very digital. Moving stripes and patterns remind us of the behaviour our technologies sometimes show, which are also used in different forms of art (think: glitch art). And this brings an interesting question: why do we associate these paintings with digitalism, if their subject is about geometry and perception?

Via Artsy, VigoGallery, Johnny Abrahams