Drawing from our collective consciousness of visual tropes, the self-taught artist Damian Loeb (born 1970) creates paintings that reflect a fascination with two worlds, the analogue and the digital. Combining classical painting techniques with a consuming obsession with new media and technology, Loeb’s work references the traditional themes of art history, the language of cinematography, and images from our visually saturated contemporary culture.

Loeb’s early paintings were based on collaged images appropriated from advertising, magazines, and films, which he recontextualized, edited, and compressed to heighten their unsettling narrative qualities. After photographers brought a series of lawsuits against the artist over copyright infringement, Loeb taught himself photography and began using his own photographs as source imagery for his paintings, embarking on series of cinematic portraits and landscapes.

Cathedral Butte, based on a photograph the artist shot from high above the canyon in Utah, belongs to a series of landscapes the artist began in 2011. Painting grand and cinematic scenes of Earth and its celestial environs, in his landscapes the artist draws from the tradition of the sublime in landscape painting while also investigating the precarious state of our planet in the universe.