Part of Hybrid Realities :Lab 1 (Lab → Output)
Virtual installation, Newart.city
Transparent Background translates Basil Betley’s painted figures into a digital landscape that sits somewhere between humour and unease.
The work draws on the artist’s nightly practice of creating cartoons inspired by the lives of friends and community — scenes of dancing, confusion, fear, embarrassment and tenderness. These figures often appear as exaggerated caricatures, their grotesque or warped expressions balanced by humour and affection.
Within the installation, these paintings are digitally cut and arranged into a spatial environment. The figures occupy a landscape defined by absence: a vacuum of space surrounding the subject.
The background itself becomes the conceptual anchor of the work. Borrowing the familiar grey-and-white grid pattern used in digital design to indicate transparency, the environment evokes both the night sky and the infinite storage of a computer system. Space becomes comparable to a hard drive - a boundless container where fragments of image and experience drift.
The work moves between two scales: the intimate space of the artist’s bedroom where the paintings originate, and the infinite digital field of the virtual environment. Through this shift, Transparent Background positions everyday human moments within an expansive and slightly unsettling computational cosmos.
Basil Betley