Artists

Emilia Trog (she/her) works with Diamond Painting, a popular craft in which predefined colour fields are filled with small plastic gems according to a fixed grid. What appears to promise creativity is, in fact, built on rigid repetition and meticulous execution. The square diamond pieces resemble the pixels of a digital image, turning low resolution into a visual principle.
With their glossy, seductive surfaces, Diamond Paintings hover between art and kitsch. They evoke, for instance, the late-capitalist logic of the gimmick: objects designed to capture our attention and promise added value, while carrying their own redundancy within them. Emilia takes this aesthetic as a point of departure for her artistic practice, drawing attention to the processes through which images are translated and come into being. The individual diamond-pixels become a fluid and movable image material, allowing her to trace different gestures and movements across the surface. Digital colour information is reduced, translated into a system of symbols, and finally reassembled on the canvas using individual rhinestones. This makes visible how an image changes as it is translated between digital and material image systems.

Diamond Painting promises creativity, even though the motif, colours and position of each gem are already predetermined. What role does this contradiction play in your work?
Diamond Painting follows an almost mechanical process: each gem is placed, one by one, in a predetermined position. At the same time, this means that you quite literally hold every single pixel in your hand. For me, this raises questions about what we understand as creative work in the first place. Throughout their production, the images are also repeatedly translated and compressed: from the digital image through different colour systems and grids to the material surface. In this process, some information is lost, while other aspects suddenly become visible. Images therefore emerge not as something stable, but as something that changes with every medium and every step of production. It is precisely this instability, and the question of what ultimately still constitutes the image, that interests me.