CutUp is a group of London based artists, whose work mainly revolves around the manipulation of billboard advertisements. Their first works consisted of removing a billboard, painstakingly cutting it up into roughly 4000 small rectangles, each one in essence a pixel, and then reassembling the billboard. This fragmenting devision of a whole image re-invents each rectangular segment as a tone to define the surrounding 'pixels' forming innovative imagery and text. Addressing the issue of in-your-face advertisting as a prominant influence upon popular culture, CutUp provokes their audience to question mass media advertising by abstracting it directly from its source reaching as many viewers as the original advertisement. Taking billboards as an example, the impact of persuasive imagery to advertise is deliberate in its entirety. From colour scheme, type face and text; to scale location and visual stimulants advertisers use every available element to manipulate their target audience. It is by breaking down these ideosyncratic elements that CutUp creates a re-invented impact of art on the street replacing consumerism.Aside from the obvious similarity between cutups billboards and pixelated digital imagery, I feel that the aesthetic impact of these works resembles that of the fine art portraiture paintings by one of my favourite artists Chuck close. He too constructs imagery through a devided grid of shapes and tone, expanding the boundaries of hyper-realism by working from photographs to paint roughly executed regions of colour consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background. Each devision is intended to contain a percieved 'average' hue which makes sence from a distance. The result is eye catching and as with the CutUp billboards the finished images seem to carry more information and underlying meaning through the abstracted devisions.
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