PROBABLY THE CLOSEST most geeks ever get to art is cosying up to their Macbooks, but an Israeli artist, Shony Rivnay, wants to change that by bringing the world of technology into a fancy gallery and hanging it on the wall for people to gawk at.

A partner at the Israeli branch of Saatchi & Saatchi (Baumann -Ber-Rivnay), Shony Rivnay, recently branched out from the advertising world to pursue his passion for art and painting abstract images with tech friendly titles such as "container" and "processor".

Rivnay's current exhibition, "How Things Work" deals with the subject of nature as a machine, expressing the idea that everything has some sort of biomechanical identity.

Rivnay likes to paint abstracts of power systems, of motherboards and even of biological cellular organisms in a way that he reckons shows how everything is connected to a larger energy system, including light, life, breath and thermodynamics. His art depicts what critics have called "superconductors", in that wiring and circuitry, which allow electricity to flow freely through a device, provide a sort of "pulse" inside machines. This mechanical life giving force is what Rivnay’s art seems to be about.

He uses bright industrial colours, to give an effect not unlike looking through a microscope, except the image is enlarged, taken out of context and rather abstract. The paintings aren’t by any means detailed representations of micro circuitry or chips, and you won’t find them in your new motherboard users manual, but they do somehow manage to convey the "idea" of technology, even without explicitly depicting the nuts, bolts and micro chips of it all. µ

L'Inq

Tavi Dresdner Gallery