Painting From Data: Turning Charts Into Abstract Art
What if your spreadsheet could bleed?
In Hayal Pozanti’s recent work, data ceases to be dry. In her series she “encrypts” metrics, digital information about commerce, environment, human behaviour, into a glyph‑alphabet of shapes. These shapes then blossom into tangled, mural‑scale abstractions, hand‑rendered with oil sticks, body‑sweeping gestures, and painterly intuition. The output: canvases where data becomes flesh, memory, and metaphor.
Charts are often dismissed as functional, cold, rational. Yet beneath those grids and lines, lies a hidden terrain of desire, fear, memory: a topography beyond language. To paint from data is to excavate these unseen geographies. It is to translate the abstract pulse of human behaviour into form, colour, texture into something that can be seen, felt, interpreted.
Take a heatmap of social engagement. At first glance: technical. Clinical. Almost mathematical. But approached as a painter’s sketch, it becomes a constellation of attention, longing, distraction. Each spike: a flare of emotion. Each gradient: a wave of collective consciousness. Rendering that in pigment is not mimicry, it is alchemy. Quantified evidence turns into qualitative experience.
Translation carries paradox. Data demands precision. Abstraction breathes chaos. Patterns appear then the hand intervenes: hesitation, doubt, intuition. A line tracing correlation might bend under curious touch. A cluster might dissolve, blur into gesture. Certainty drenched in ambiguity. Statistics begin to breathe.
Emerging digital tools: generative simulations and neural networks expand this terrain of possibility, drawing out patterns invisible to the naked eye. Still, the most compelling works emerge when the machine is not the artist, but the interlocutor. The algorithm proposes; the hand decides. The painting becomes negotiation: cold logic meets human instinct to sense, hesitate, feel.
Philosophically: painting from data becomes an ethical act. Data though numeric maps human lives: choices, biases, interactions. Converting it into abstraction is to mediate between observation and empathy; to honor the lived experience hidden behind every statistic. The canvas stands as both mirror and intervention: visualising invisible structures of attention, desire, memory, while reaffirming the artist’s interpretive agency.
In the end, a painting derived from charts is neither map nor mirror, it is thought‑experiment made tangible. It asks: can you perceive patterns as affect rather than information? Can you feel motion where there was once only logic? Can you detect the human pulse behind abstraction? The work lives in the tension: precision and intuition, analysis and experience, data and soul.
Step in. Decode. Feel. Let the data bleed.