Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue is an exhibition of paintings, prints, and experimental film by Australian artist Jonas Balsaitis (b. 1948, Germany), re-examining the artist’s use of ‘imaging systems’ in the context of contemporary developments in technology. Bringing together Balsaitis’s three monumental Metron paintings for the first time since their initial display at Pinacotheca Gallery Melbourne in 1972, Analogue shines a light on one of Australia’s most profound, yet underrepresented, experimental artists.

Since the 1960s, Balsaitis has been drawn to the idea that “reality is on the screen”. As information began to travel through networks at accelerated speed, Balsaitis and his generation witnessed a revelatory digital transformation: where objects like handwritten notes, a photograph, or an event in the ‘real’ world could be transposed through the digital ether to rematerialise as an image on a screen. Balsaitis became aware that we live between two kinds of experience—between the digital and the phenomenological. This awareness led him to investigate how one category of experience might be present in another.

In his catalogue essay, curator Oscar Capezio asks: How might we confront the challenge of visibility and virtualisation today, when so many different phenomena that impact our lives remain invisible to the human eye— either because they are too big or too small, too fast or too slow, or because they exist in magnitudes and quantities that can only be comprehended through diagrams or mathematical equations?